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L>. HIGBEE 



^ NEW YORK 

i BELFORD COMPANY, PUBLISHERS 

ft iS-22 East i8th SriiEET 


[Publishers of Belford's Ma^azitti\ 


lie IJelforcl American Novel Series. No. 28. Annual Subscription, $15.00. Issued weekK 
Entered at the New York Post Office as second-class matter. May 5, i8qo. 



IN “GOD’S COUNTRY 


r 





IN “GOD’S COUNTRY” 


A NOVEL 


D. HIGBEE 


r 



BEDFORD COMPANY 

New York: 18-22 East i8th Street 

PUBLISHERS 

^Publishers of Bel/ord's Magazine^ 



Copyright, 1889, by 

BELFORD COMPANY 


PREFATORY NOTE. 


This tragic story of “the dark and 
bloody ground ” made a deep impression 
when it appeared as a completed novelette 
in Belford's Magazine ; and, in its present 
form, it is ^lieved that it will receive, 
as'it deserves to receive, a wider and more 
serious attention than is commonly be- 
stowed upon our ever-multiplying stock 
of literary effusions. 

It is a romance of Kentucky, racy of 
the soil, redolent of the barn-yard and 
the stable, rich with the tints of bluegrass 
in the landscape, yet so subtile in struct- 
ure, and so filled with the spirit of tragedy, 
as to rise above the latter-day common- 
5 


6 


Prefatory Nate. 


place of our uninspired life into the atmos- 
phere of the idyllic, and to be at one and 
the same time a current chronicle, an an- 
tique and a classic. 

What but the vision of true genius could 
see success in a task so original and dar- 
ing as the creation of a throbbing heart- 
interest out of materials so simple, so 
slight, and so trite ? and whose but the hand 
of an artist could have given to this task 
execution so powerful and brilliant ? 

“ In ‘ God’s Country ’ ” is the plain and 
circumstantial narrative of a woman’s 
struggle with that great passion which has 
wrecked and brightened so many lives. 
It is the old, old story of love and pride. 
There are but four characters : a country 
girl, of the average sort ; her father, a 
country gentleman of the average sort ; a 
horsy lover, of the average sort; and a 


Prefatory Note. 


7 


tramp, very far indeed from the average 
sort. The plot-interest turns upon the de- 
velopment of the heart-interest. There is 
no striving here for effect. The lights and 
shadows are furnished by the idiosyncra- 
sies of a situation purely local and natural. 
Into the tran'quil existence of a well-bred 
but motherless girl, living alone with her 
father, and the head of his establishment, 
and betrothed, as a kind oC matter-of- 
course, to a young man with whom she has 
grown to womanhood — her own and her 
father’s choice — there comes a spell 
against which she is wholly unable to con- 
tend, and beneath whose enchanting death- 
strokes she ultimately falls. 

It is difficult to conceive how the sore 
travail of Lydia Ran some could have had 
any other ending. It is the misfortune of 
women in positions such as hers — the not 


8 


Prefatory Note. 


uncommon position of an internal battle 
between conflicting sentiments of honor, 
duty, and affection — that, unequal in point 
of intellectual strength to meet the inces- 
sant drain upon their nervous energies, 
and to think clearly, they are also unsup- 
ported by the wisdom of worldly experi- 
ence, and are dashed upon the rocks of 
conventional usage — often irrelevant to the 
actual issue involved — by the waves of 
their own emotion, which, unlike the tides 
of the ocean, are controlled by no law 
except that which superstition and passion 
make unto themselves. A wicked woman 
in Lydia’s place would have known pre- 
cisely what to do. A good woman, with a 
sufficiency of moral courage and knowl- 
edge of life, would have been equally .sure 
of her course. But there is a woman be- 
tween the two, not bad enough to be a 


Prefatory Note. 


9 


schemer, not strong enough to be a hero- 
ine — truly feminine and lovely — who, when 
left alone upon the sea of human passion, 
is as a frail boat tossed by every wind. Of 
this type was Lydia Ran some ; having a 
noble, aspiring nature ; perceptions and 
susceptibilities divinely born ; of ready per- 
sonal courage and social tact ; but half- 
made upon the spiritual side, and a slave 
to the abridgments and prejudices of the 
provincial code under which her lot had 
been cast. There was nothing for it but 
anguish, despair, and death. She could 
not rise high enough, nor sink low enough, 
to escape. How' she fell, like a martyr, if 
not like a heroine, is told with a power rare 
to modern fiction ; and the lesson that 
issues thence, sweet as the flowers that 
sprang from her grave, is full of a wo- 
man’s appeal and protest against the 


10 


Frefatory Note. 


limitations with which custom hedges her 
about, whilst giving the man remission 
and license. 

Of the male characters little need be 
said. Colonel Ransome, the father, is a 
good type of the country gentleman of 
Central Kentucky, well-drawn and not ex- 
aggerated. Horrible as the final catas- 
trophe is, it is possible. The two other 
males, the horsy lover and the weird 
tramp, are mere shadows; the identity of 
the tramp arousing the suspicion of the 
reader from the opening episode of Schu- 
bert’s Serenade, and entirely revealing it- 
self in that superb dramatic climax, which 
makes a new world for Lydia, and fills it 
with the music of the spheres. The clos- 
ing chapters are breezy with action and 
of breathless interest ; and the finale is 
reached with the abrupt force of intense 


Prefatory Note. 


1 


feeling, but without the sacrifice of artistic 
finish. 

I venture to say thus much of this story 
because of its merits, intrinsically consid- 
ered, and because of the promise it gives 
of a new and original presence in a field 
where, at its best, mere photography seems 
to have taken the place of the pencil and 
the pen, and cultivated mediocrity rules 
supreme. “ In ‘ God’s Country,’ ” is a 
bucket out of the well of human passion, 
sympathy, and love, from which Georges 
Sand and George Eliot brought forth such 
copious draughts, giving us assurance that 
the waters there have not gone dry. Let 
us hope that, in the personality of “ D. 
Higbee,” this assurance will be fully real- 
ized. 

Henry Watterson. 


Courier-Journal of Jan. 3, 1890. 



IN “GOD’S COUNTRY.” 


I. 

It was an afternoon in early spring, 
sunny and soft, but a trifle cool in the 
shade^ The air was heavy with the odor 
of locust-blooms that met in a long, snowy 
arch over the smooth, white turnpike, and 
the grassy margin on either side the high- 
way was dotted with wild violets, blue and 
white. The road traversed the region 
known as Central Kentucky, and on each 
side of it, now level, now rolling, stretched 
the fertile uplands of the “ Bluegrass.” In 
every direction the eye encountered an 

13 


14 


In “ God's Country. 


attenuated line of darker green that 
marked the capricious winding and doub- 
ling of the Elkhorn, which spread itself 
over the landscape like loops of a tangled 
skein. 

Along this flowery, fragrant highway a 
man walked slowly, wearily. He wore a 
wide-brimmed slouch hat that almost con- 
cealed his face, and carried a queer knap- 
sack strapped upon his back, which, like 
the rest of his belongings, was thickly 
coated with the fine white dust of the 
“ pike.” His clothes were not so new, nor 
so exact in their correspondence to the 
length and breadth of his figure as they 
might have been. He was tall and would 
have seemed slender but for the bagging 
superfluity of his garments, and he carried 
himself with an easy grace that refused to 
yield to the conspiracy of fatigue and 


In “ God's Country! 


15 


uncouth attire. In a buttonhole of his 
dilapidated coat was a bunch of violets 
gathered from the roadside, and in his 
hand a blooming branch of locust that 
trailed a faint, sweet odor as he went. 

It was four o’clock in the afternoon 
when he stopped in front of a wide, lime- 
washed farm gate that opened into a broad 
avenue, at the other end of which a cluster 
of chimneys, rising out of a grove of ma- 
ples, indicated a dwelling of some sort. 
He turned in at the gate and followed the 
carriage-drive toward the house. The 
sward was starred with golden dandelions ; 
above him the maples, not yet in leaf, 
swung their pale yellow tassels, throwing 
frail, web-like shadows over the tender 
green of the young bluegrass ; to right and 
left of him lay fertile reaches of pasture, 
broad fields of freshly turned earth, acres 


i6 


hi “ God's Country. 


of newly springing cereals in varying 
shades of green ; — a landscape in the un- 
obtrusive tints of a water-color, domed 
with a sweep of grayish-blue sky and 
flooded with the pale, tremulous light of an 
April sun. 

The soft green of the young grass, the 
furrowed fields of rich, brown loam whose 
clean, earthy smell was borne to him by 
the breeze, presented a soothing contrast 
to the glare of the hard, white road. His 
eyes dwelt lingeringly upon the prospect ; 
he breathed deeply the fresh air, with its 
stimulating aroma of ploughed land, and 
removed his hat that he might feel the cool 
wind upon his head as he walked leisurely 
toward the house. As he drew near, the 
structure became more distinct in outline. 
It was a square, old-fashioned house with 
a hall running through the middle, and a 


In God's Cotmtryl 


17 


porch in front, like all the other dwellings 
he had passed during the day. Clustered 
about it were the innumerable outbuildings 
that give every Kentucky farm the appear- 
ance of a populous village. There was the 
long, low line of lime-washed log cabins, 
with its group of ebony figures in front. 
To the left gleamed the white walls of the 
training stable, also with its sprawling 
group around the door. Between the 
stable and the house there was a glimpse 
of smooth water, where the fish-pond lay, 
edged with a golden fringe of willows still 
bare of foliage. Beyond rose the grassy 
undulations of the orchard, whose green 
billows were capped with foamy crests of 
apple-bloom that leapt and danced in the 
brisk, strong wind. 

Presently he could distinguish a moving 
object upon the lawn and a vivid point of 


i8 


Ifi ‘‘ God's Country. 


color glinting through the shrubbery. A 
hammock with a feminine occupant devel- 
oped gradually against the green back- 
ground ; the point of color became a scar- 
let shawl ; and the steadily diminishing 
perspective brought out such minor details 
as a slender, slippered foot, tapping the 
ground now and then to keep the ham- 
mock in motion, and a cascade of lace- 
edged ruffles escaping to view through a 
negligent arrangement of drapery. 

He walked to within a few feet of the 
hammock and stood watching its burden 
across the top of a spreading syringa that 
screened him from view. For a moment 
he forgot his hunger and his weariness in 
the contemplation of the most delicious 
incarnation of idle revery his imagination 
could picture. Though her eyes were 
closed! she was not asleep, for the foot 


In “ God's Country^ 


9 


kept tapping the sward ; and over the edge 
of the hammock and down upon the grass 
streamed a flowing abundance of red gold 
hair, damp and clinging, that caught and 
held the light like amber. 

He was loath to disturb her, for he was 
sure no other pose could be so perfectly, 
so unconsciously picturesque ; but he was 
very hungry, and the urging of the material 
man began at last to blunt the artistic 
sense. For a second’s space he stood 
irresolute, then, with a deploring glance at 
his attire, which at that moment was more 
obtrusively distasteful to him than at any 
time since he had assumed it, he stepped 
softly from behind the bush. 

Her face was turned in the opposite 
direction, but in a moment the odor of the 
locust branch he carried had filled the air. 
She opened her eyes, turned her head 


20 


l7i “ God's Country." 


slightly, and saw him standing before her, 
dusty and pale, asking for something to 
eat. 

She sprang up instantly and covered him 
with a swift, startled glance. That hurried 
inspection was sufficient to muster him into 
the great army of outcasts, few specimens 
of which penetrated the peaceful and 
plenteous seclusion that environed her. 
Then she remembered that there was no 
one within call but the negro women at the 
cabin, who were in as great terror of tramps 
as herself, and would be likely to run in 
the other direction as soon as they under- 
stood the situation. The bunch of violets 
on his dusty lapel caught her eye just in 
time to arrest the blood-curdling shriek 
rising in her throat. In another moment 
the intruder had removed his hat, and with 
that act the look of consternation faded 


In “ God's Country, 


21 


from her face. His boutonniere alone 
would have been a certificate of char- 
acter ;^the man who had violets in but- 
tonhole was not likely to have spoons in 
his pocket or murder in his heart : but a 
man who took off his hat in that way was 
above suspicion of crime. She was accus- 
tomed to seeing the male head uncovered 
in her presence. Every man who met her, 
whether he knew her or not, every negro 
who passed her in the road, lifted his hat; 
but until this moment she had no concep- 
tion of how much might be conveyed in 
that simple gesture. Admiration — the de- 
light of an artistic temperament in what is 
ideally beautiful ; reverence for the being 
that enshrined it ; a humiliating sense of 
his own unprepossessing appearance and 
unwarrantable intrusion upon the idyllic 
harmony of the scene ; a certain lofty 


22 


In “ God's Country." 


courtesy defying the drapery of indigence 
that enveloped him ; — all blended in that 
eloquent movement, equally remote from 
the servile obeisance of the negro and the 
off-hand greetings she received from her 
associates. 

Yes, he was a tramp certainly, but with a 
difference that entitled him to humane con- 
sideration and removed for the moment 
her appalling dread of all such outcasts. 
She would give him a lunch. 

She rose, caught up with a hairpin the 
loose, clinging mass of hair, adjusted the 
scarlet shawl, and led the way to the porch 
at the back of the house. She gave him a 
chair, and going to the end of the porch 
lifted up a clear, ringing voice, and called 
“ Meriky ! ” several times. 

The sound fell faintly on the ears of 
Meriky (America), dozing in the cabin 


In “ God’s Country.” 


23 


door, who blinked her lazy lids but did not 
stir. “ That nigger ain’t worth her salt,” 
murmured Miss Ransome, more to herself 
than to her listener, as she swept a basket 
of hopelessly dishevelled embroidery silks 
off a small round table and proceeded to 
spread the lunch herself. Her pensioner 
had eaten many lunches, and had gone 
without many more than he had eaten, 
since he started upon his long, tedious 
tramp ; he had eaten many lunches in many 
lands : but he could remember nothing 
quite so appetizing as the rosy, fragrant 
slices of ham, the cold chicken, the beaten 
biscuits, and the pitcher of cold milk that 
were set before him this afternoon. 

When his meal was ready. Miss Ran- 
some, who by this time had bethought her 
of the gallant thieveries of ‘ Claude Duval 
and his ilk, seated herself near the table, 


24 


In “ God's Country! 


so that, in case her hasty estimate of the 
man were at fault, she would be able to 
keep an eye upon the silver cup from which 
he was drinking his milk, and the other ^ 
articles she had incautiously laid before 
him. 

/she took up the embroidery, but was not 
too much engaged to notice that his hands 
were very small and finely shaped, and 
that, although he was very hungry, he dis- 
posed of his food daintily, as one acquainted 
with polite arts. 

His blond hair, longer than she was ac- 
customed to seeing it worn by men, was 
pushed negligently back from -a forehead 
whose veined pallor presented a startling 
contrast to the sunburnt face. His eyes 
had a pleasant light in them, and the short, 
slightly curling beard, shading from blond 
to pale brown, only partially concealed the 


In “ God's Country, 


25 


curves of a mouth that was above reproach. 
As Miss Ransome noted these details she 
was moved to speculate upon his ante- 
cedent life, and presently had him relieved 
against a background of romance that 
would have done credit to the imagination 
of Scott or Dumas. The slight foreign ac- 
cent that colored his speech was all that 
was needed to give the utmost latitude to 
invention. She could not tell from it what 
he was, but he was not an American. She 
thought he might be French. He had at 
all events some connection with that old 
land so rich in song and story. A fervid 
fancy, untempered by experience, untram- 
melled by facts, played over him in auroral 
flashes, and fitted his plastic figure into a 
thousand romantic incidents. 

As often as she looked directly at him, 
she caught him in the act of withdrawing 


26 


I?i “ God’s Country. 


his eyes from a furtive perusal of herself ; 
and when they met her own fully, as they 
did once or twice, there crossed her mind a 
fleeting fragment of rhyme about some- 
thing that was “deeply, darkly, beautifully 
blue.” When he had finished, he stood 
before her a moment to acknowledge her 
kindness. 

“ I vill vork for you for my dinner,” he 
said. 

There was a suggestion of helplessness 
in his imperfect utterance that appealed to 
the maternal instinct like the lisp of a 
baby. She was so occupied with his man- 
ner of delivering it that she did not catch 
the import of his remark until he repeated 
it. Then her face flushed. 

“ Never mind,” she answered, hastily ; 
“ you are quite welcome ; besides, there is 
nothing to do.” 


In “ God’s Country. 


27 


It was singular that in the vagabond, 
pure and simple, there was nothing incom- 
patible with poetic associations ; but the 
moment she thought of him at work — 
carrying stove-wood or cutting weeds to 
pay for his dinner — the prismatic fantasy 
in which he had just been figuring dis- 
solved instantly, leaving only the bare, un- 
romantic fact of beggary. 

“ Den I vill sing you a song,” he said, 
with the same soft intonation and appeal- 
ing faultiness of speech, as he stood look- 
ing down at the guitar that lay on a chair 
by her. 

She handed him the instrument, and 
noticed that his hands adjusted themselves 
to neck and strings with a familiar grace 
which all her patient practice had not yet 
acquired. 

She watched him enviously, as, stand- 


28 


In “ God^s Country! 


ing a little below her on the steps of the 
porch, he tuned the guitar and daintily 
picked a prelude. 

Then, in a voice soft, mellifluous, 
sweeter than anything she had dreamed 
possible from a male throat, came the 
opening measure of Schubert’s serenade 
modulated to a breath. The air was un- 
familiar, the language strange — she could 
not understand a line of it ; but what 
matter ? f What soul attuned to music 
could mistake the burden of that exquisite 
melody, tossed off in "an obscure beer- 
cellar to a chorus of clinking glasses and 
drunken laughter, but freighted forever 
with the tremulous ecstasy of “ doubtful 
hope,” embodying the most tender and 
ethereal dream of love that heart of man 
has conceived ? She had never before 
heard a male voice mellowed by culture, 


29 


In “ God's Country." 


and at the first phrase of that song, in 
which a soul seemed exhaled, she dropped 
the embroidery in her lap and leaned back 
in her chair. At the pleading pause in the 
minor change, “ Liebchen, hbre mich,” 
a strange, new feeling stirred within her, 
and something rose in her throat. 

“ Bebend harr’ ich dir entgegen, komm» 
begliicke mich, Komm, begliicke mich, 
begliicke mich,” he sang, with appealing 
iteration ; and as the last word fell fainting 
a semitone above the original keynote, 
leaving a feeling of prayer unanswered, 
the figure on the step was seen dimly as 
through a mist. 

He returned the instrument, which she 
took from him without a word, and sat 
watching him through moist lashes as he 
turned away. In a moment the battered 
slouch hat had fallen over him like an 


30 


In “ God's Country ' 


extinguisher, and a tramp of the most 
ordinary and uninteresting appearance was 
effaced by the mass of fluffy white pom- 
pons that covered the snowball-bush at 
the end of the porch. As he crossed the 
lawn on the way out, he paused beside the 
hammock. Caught in the meshes of the 
net was a piece of pink ribbon that had 
been torn from Miss Ransome’s dress in 
the violent attempt to rise that followed 
her first glimpse of the intruder. The 
tramp disengaged it, and, after pressing 
his lips to it, tied it in his buttonhole, 
taking care to spread out the knot and 
arrange the loops effectively, and went out 
toward the road, humming, softly, “ Lieb- 
chen, hore mich.” 

Miss Ransome’s eyes returned from the 
snowball-bush behind which the figure had 
disappeared to the spot where it had stood, 


In “ God's Country." 


31 


and they rested upon a bunch of violets 
that lay on the step. She took them up 
gently, noticed that the stems were neatly 
woven together with a blade of grass, and 
pinned them on the bosom of her dress. 


11 . 


Colonel Ransome’s household con- 
sisted of himself, his daughter Lydia, and 
a large number of negroes of all sizes, the 
small ones being especially numerous and 
prominent. It may be well to remark in 
passing that he came legitimately by the 
two essentials of a “ Kentucky gentle- 
man,” against which the outside world has 
broken so many shafts of derision — his 
title and his pride of ancestry. 

His baptismal names, Wickliffe Preston, 
proclaimed his derivation from two of the 
most prominent families in the State, and, 
through them, his connection either by 
blood or marriage with a majority of the 

historic names of Kentucky and Virginia. 
32 


In “ God's Country! 


33 


On his mother’s side he traced his lineage 
back through the tough fibre of the Mac- 
Dowell stock to the sturdy house of Argyll. 
It was through the maternal strain that he 
was turned away from the easy-going faith 
known to the ruffle-shirted forefathers of 
the other branch of the family as the 
Church of England, to the uncompromising 
Presbyterianism to which he subscribed. 
His religious belief was not so dominant in 
character as to exert an appreciable influ- 
ence upon his outer life, but it was a part 
of the man, and as far as it went it was 
Calvinistic. It had come down to him 
along with the ancestral record and the 
family silver, and he no more thought of 
turning it over for inspection than of 
questioning the solidity of his plate or the 
authenticity of his pedigree. He had 
perhaps but an imperfect impression of the 
3 


34 


In “ God's Coimtry, 


articles embraced in his creed, but any- 
thing that could have been shown to exist 
therein would have met with his instant 
approval and strenuous defence. He 
would, have fought for it as valiantly, bled 
for it as cheerfully, as he had fought and 
bled for State rights. 

CHis ancestors had been conspicuously 
concerned in every historic event of im- 
portance since their first settlement in 
Virginia; and, according to his reasoning, 
the men who bought with their blood the 
greatest country on earth, and nursed it 
through a perilous infancy, were as glori- 
ously deserving of knighthood as the le- 
gions that followed William the Conqueror 
into England. Their deeds were not less 
heroic because they lacked the heraldic 
patent that was but the outward symbol of 
achievement ; their nobility was none the 


In “ God^s Country. 


35 


less real because untitled : and he was as 
proudly conscious of good blood as if his 
plate had borne a dozen quarterings. 

Sired by an illustrious line of fighters, 
his military record followed naturally. At 
the beginning of the war, when the State 
Guard, hotly indignant at the action of 
Kentucky, shouldered the government 
arms and marched after Buckner into 
Tennessee, Wickliffe Ransome made one 
of the impatient throng of horsemen who 
for weeks after the abandonment of 
neutrality filled all the roads leading 
southward, hurrying across the line to cast 
in their lot with the young Confederacy. 
He started with the Sixth Kentucky, and 
followed its fortunes through the war, 
winning his promotion brilliantly in a 
brigade that fought like the three hundred 
at Thermopylae. When the crowning dis- 


36 


In “ God's Country- 


aster came, and he returned, covered with 
the humiliation of defeat, he found his 
wife dead, and his possessions reduced to 
a motherless daughter then nine years 
of age, four hundred acres of bluegrass 
land overgrown with weeds and brush, and 
the dismantled wreck of a once luxurious 
homestead standing open to the wind and 
rain 

The house was not fit to live in, and the 
land was worth nothing without the labor 
that had made it profitable. The negroes 
were free, and there was no money to 
begin the work of reparation. The child 
and the sister, widowed by the conflict, 
who must hereafter depend upon him for 
support, spurred him to endeavor. The 
land was mortgaged, and with the money 
thus obtained the house was repaired, 
stock and farming implements were 


37 


In “ God^s Country! 


bought, and a number of negroes were col- 
lected who, now that there was nothing 
more to steal in the bare land, were willing 
to work upon promise of pay. Mrs. 
Payne, the Colonel’s widowed sister, who 
had cared for his daughter since her 
mother’s death, came to live with him ; 
and under her womanly and ingenious 
supervision the home began to assume 
something of the old luxurious aspect. 
Gradually the wilderness was reclaimed, 
and blossomed as the rose, yielding the 
more abundantly for its season of rest. It 
was marvellous how quickly all trace of 
devastation vanished. Three years after 
the surrender of Lee a stranger travelling 
through the country, who had seen it in 
war-time, congratulated the Colonel on the 
swift recovery from disaster. 

“Well,” replied the Colonel, proudly. 


38 


hi God's Country." 


r 

/‘it is God’s country, and the land don’t 
need much coaxin^^ 

It was now ten years since the war. 
The cheery little woman who had presided 
over the Colonel’s house, and bestowed a 
tender maternal care upon his child, was 
dead„ and the bright-eyed, fair-haired 
daughter had risen to the dignity of man- 
aging his domestic affairs. 

The Colonel was still young in spite of 
his forty-five years and the iron-gray locks 
that waved thickly about his fine head. 
He was six feet two inches in height, and 
the figure, once slender and wiry, had 
acquired in the last decade a generous 
breadth of chest and shoulder that was 
massive without being ponderous; and 
this, with his erect military carriage, gave 
him an imposing presence; on horseback 
he was superb. The fire of youth still 


In “ God's Country! 


39 


burned in his steel-blue eye; and in the 
strong, combative chin and the level line 
of the lips lurked the unflinching courage, 
the tenacity of opinion and purpose, that 
were part of his inheritance. His face 
was suffused with a mild ruddiness induced 
by liberal living and an habitual but tem- 
perate use of the native beverage in its 
purity -and the yellow perfection of age. 
The habit of command at home and in the 
field had fixed upon him the authoritative 
manner that a stranger would mistake for 
arrogance, which in the presence of his 
friends, tempered by the suavity of the 
man of the world, was at once commanding 
and gentle. 

Toward women he bore himself with the 
insidious persuasiveness, the soft, caressing 
manner peculiar to the Southerner, for 
wliich the Kentuckian is pre-eminently dis~ 


40 


l7i “ God^s Country. 


tinguished — a manner in which a flattering 
show of homage is blended with that ten- 
der and apparently absorbing solicitude by 
which a man seems to envelop the object 
of his attentions in a protecting presence ; 
to become at the same moment her guar- 
dian and her slave ; to surround her with 
an atmosphere of sanctity while imploring 
the favor that would dissipate it ; — a man- 
ner irresistibly fascinating to women, even 
when it is known to be insincere. 

His attitude toward the sex was charac- 
teristic. Beauty was not only a charm, but 
a virtue. The woman who had no claim 
to beauty was a social nonentity ; she who 
had lost the bloom and freshness of youth, 
an unlit shrine, interesting only as an altar 
round which had once shone the flame that 
compelled his worship. To him the ideal 
woman was, first of all beautiful, and one 


In “ God’s Country.” 


41 


who could think only with her heart. All 
mental activity was regarded as pernicious, 
and the woman who exhibited signs of it 
was held in the same curious aloofness 
with which he would have examined some 
strange, glittering insect that might or 
might not have a sting. A woman could 
not possibly think lucidly ; any attempt on 
her part to deal at first hand with the prob- 
lems of life could only result in increased 
confusion ; it were far better that she did 
not meddle with edged tools. No gift, 
spiritual or mental, could compensate him 
for the absence of that absolute physical 
perfection w'hich the Kentuckian seeks 
with equal pertinacity in his sweetheart and 
his horse : in the realization of which he 
believes “careful grooming ” to play a part 
only second to that of “good blood.” 

The love of such a man might be lack- 


42 


In God's Country. 


ing in poetry, in ideality, even in the “ stay- 
ing” quality he considers so essential to 
man and beast, but it was edged with the 
keen relish of the connoisseur, which was 
never wholly lost in the lover. Like all his 
countrymen, Colonel Ransome subscribed 
loyally to the belief that Kentucky women 
lead the world in beauty ; and while this 
opinion was attributable in a measure to a 
natural pride in the products of his native 
State, it was not without an element of 
sound philosophy. Occupied for the 
greater portion of his life with the care and 
breeding of blooded stock, experience had 
taught him the power of selection in 
accenting a type when exercised through 
successive generations with reference to 
the same quality. He considered the 
physical perfection of Kentucky women 
directly due to the fastidious instinct of 


In “ God's Country." 


43 


natural selection in the men, which made 
beauty the dominant consideration in mar- 
riage. With this irresistible influence at 
work ill the interest of beauty it were 
indeed singular if surpassing results were 
not obtained. He frequently remarked 
that a man owed it to his children to marry 
a fine woman ; and those who had known 
his wife cheerfully testified that he had 
fully discharged his obligation to posterity. 
Indeed, his daughter Lydia was a sufficient 
proof of the possibilities of his theory when 
systematically carried out. His wife died 
young; he had been spared the ordeal of 
watching her fade and grow old ; and death 
and time had obliterated such trifling 
imperfections of temperament as might 
have jarred his domestic harmony, leaving 
only the charm of a beautiful and gracious 
presence that was his one sacred memory. 


44 


In “ God's Country! 


Lydia had rewarded his discriminating 
choice by faithfully reproducing the attrac- 
tions that influenced it. Like her mother, 
she had that fineness of organism that is 
the first requisite of beauty ; she had the 
same exquisite pearly flesh-tint that is 
neither pallid nor ruddy, the same delicate 
arch of the brow, and that dark shading of 
brows and lashes that gives a peculiar 
piquancy of coloring to an ensemble other- 
wise purely blond. The profile that gained 
a subtle individual charm by its deviation 
from the prescribed line, the sensitive 
curve of the nostrils, the full, warm mouth 
were the same ; but she had a unique 
charm of her own imparted by the temper 
of the paternal metal. She reflected her 
father’s salient traits, and in her carriage, 
which he would have described as a “ free 
gait,” there was a dash^ of the military 


In God’s Country.” 


45 


erectness and precision of movement that 



distinguished his own 


person- 


ality charged with a fine nervous fire and 
an effervescent flow of vitality that found 
expression in the mobile and rapid play of 
features registering every fleeting thought, 
every passing emotion, gave to her that 
irresistible sparkle beside which the dreamy 
languor of the Oriental becomes dull, the 
classic repose of Greek ideals cold and im- 
passive. 

The red gold of ripe corn was on her 
hair, and in the liquid depths of her eyes* 
was a glow of rich, warm amber-brown that 
is most nearly approached by the color of 
fine old whisky. She shared her father's 
opinions, and endorsed his politics with 
that feminine loyalty that is the more 
stanch and abiding because void of under- 
standing. She did not know why her 


46 


In “ God’s Country: 


father was a Democrat, but she was quite 
sure that his principles were the only ones 
that could be entertained by a gentleman, 
that his political position was the only one 
tenable. Sjie was proud of his military 
record. It surrounded him with a halo of 
heroism, a glamour of romance that gave 
him a certain sacredness in her eyes. She 
loved to think, as she watched him riding 
across his own peaceful fields, that it was 
thus, with just as little fear, with the same 
superb horsemanship, but with more of fire 
and ardor, he had ridden at the enemy in 
those terrible days of wreck and disaster. 
“ What a pity it had all been for nothing ! ” 
At this thought the tears would come. 
The gory recital of “ Mission Ridge ” and 
Chickamauga was an old story to her, but 
she heard it always with a heart swelling 
with the admiration of physical courage 


In “ God''s Country- 


47 


and recklessness of life that had come to 
her with her blood. 

The third contingent of the Colonel’s 
household, the negroes, cut a conspicuous 
figure in his fortunes. Impoverished by 
their emancipation, and compelled to feed 
them when he could no longer compel 
them to work, they were a continual drain 
upon his resources, the extent of which he 
did not realize, because he had been ac- 
customed all his life to seeing them around 
him in numbers, and considered them in- 
dispensable to a moderately comfortable 
existence. 

His obtuseness to the immediate de- 
mand for remedial measures was due to 
two causes : first, to the necessity for labor 
of some kind to till the land ; second, to 
an inherent love of ease and display, fos- 
tered by education and pampered by 


48 


In God's Country! 


indulgence until it had become the pre- 
dominating influence of his life. The long 
exemption through years of prosperity, 
when personal exertion was unnecessary, 
had resulted in the lofty aloofness from 
vulgar occupations that had become second 
nature. He belonged to a class of men 
whom future generations, bred in an atmos- 
phere of new ideas, will not readily un- 
derstand. Active, determined, fertile in 
resource, but dominated by an intense 
distaste for personal exertion ; easily fa- 
tigued under ordinary circumstances, but 
displaying in an emergency, through sheer 
force of will, surpassing vigor and endur- 
ance. Not given to athletic sports, yet 
compact, well-grown, and muscular ; bear- 
ing unmurmuringly the rigors and priva- 
tions of war that try men’s souls more than 
the day of battle, but distinguished in time 


In “ God^s Country y 


49 


of peace for an insuperable aversion to 
eifort that amounted to actual helpless- 
ness ; regarding women with a paternal 
indulgence unlimited in certain directions, 
yet frequently requiring of them services 
no longer to be demanded of the negroes, 
which they were too indolent to perform 
for themselves. 

These exactions were in the majority of 
cases unconscious. The man who made 
them would have resented vigorously the 
imputation that he was pampered by the 
women of his household at the expense of 
their own comfort. He invariably pre- 
served the old formula. “ Have this or 
that done,” he would remark to his sister 
or daughter, oblivious of the fact that now 
there was no one to do it but the person 
addressed. Never at any time was there a 
glimmer of suspicidn that there was any- 
4 


5 ° 


In “ God’s Country: 


thing in his behavior at variance with the 
chivalric sentiments and grandiloquent ora- 
tory with which he would have responded 
to such a toast as “ The Women of Ken- 
tucky.” A single incident of Colonel Ran- 
some’s daily life will serve to illustrate the 
demand for personal attention character- 
istic of the Kentuckian of this period. 
His morning toilet was the event of the 
day, unless the repetition of it, which in 
warm weather always occurred at noon, 
might be considered of equal importance. 
The water for the bath had to be carried 
from the spring, which was nearly a quarter 
of a mile from the house. In order to get 
a sufficient quantity within a reasonable 
time several negroes were engaged in the 
transportation at once. The toilet proper 
was an elaborate ^process, performed al- 
ways with the same deliberate precision, 


In “ God ’s Country^ 


)) 


SI 


during which the master of the house was 
attended by half-a-dozen negroes of both 
sexes and all sizes, in the various capa- 
cities of bootblack, purveyors of towels, 
shaving water, and fresh linen, not to 
mention the boy who saddled and held his 
horse until he was ready to mount, or 
those who served him as errand boys or 
bearers of messages to others beyond the 
reach of his voice. 

A grateful relief pervaded the premises 
when the ceremony was finished, and 
“ Mahs Wick,” immaculate, glowing, and 
odorous from the lavish application of 
soap, passed out, leaving behind him a 
room so thickly strewn with limp towels 
and discarded linen that it looked like the 
track of a cyclone. A stranger would have 
supposed that so much bustling prepara- 
tion indicated a trip to town, or at least a 


52 


In “ God's Cowitry." 


ride through the neighborhood, and would 
have been surprised when it was all over to 
see the Colonel mount his sleek gray mare, 
groomed as if for a premium show, and 
rack off to the field to superintend the 
hands, who, accustomed to an overseer, 
worked only under his personal eye. 

In addition to the numerous retinue that 
served about the house, there must be 
field-hands and stable-hands, and the habit- 
ual prodigality was displayed in the num- 
ber employed. The extravagance was not, 
however, wholly without excuse. At least 
three negroes were required to do the work 
of one active, energetic white man. They 
had to be paid the same, and they ate just 
as much. When a man was hired to work 
on the place, he had to be furnished with 
a cabin to live in ; his fuel came from the 
ColonePs wood-pile or coal-house, his food 


In “ God’s Country^ 


53 


from the Colonel’s table ; and it was sel- 
dom that he did not bring a family with 
him. Sometimes the women worked in the 
house ; oftener they did nothing more 
profitable than to accumulate with exasper- 
ating ease and rapidity a worthless brood 
that fed, like grasshoppers, on the fat of 
the land. 

Now that the negroes were free to 
choose their masters, they flocked where 
there was the fairest promise of good liv- 
ing ; and they seemed to sniff from afar 
“ Mahs Wick’s ” bounty and abundance. 
They were just as numerous around him 
as they had been before the war, and the 
only difference in their condition was an in- 
credible increase in shiftlessness, ragged- 
ness, and impertinence. In spite of their 
small deserts. Colonel Ransome, like all 
men who had owned slaves, had a weak- 


54 


In “ God’s Country.” 


ness for the negro. Naturally generous, he 
treated them with an indulgence that a 
Northern employer could neither under- 
stand nor approve ; in return for which they 
plundered his “ truck patch ” and clandes- 
tinely peddled the watermelons they were 
unable to consume. When his attention 
was called to the number of mouths fed 
daily from his storeroom and smokehouse, 
he replied good-naturedly : “ If you don’t 
give them what they can eat, they’ll steal 
it. You can’t get out of feedin’ ’em, an’ 
you might as well have ’em where you can 
get some good out of ’em.” 

He liked to see them about him. Their 
presence in numbers accorded with the 
inherent tendency to pomp and ostentation 
that distinguished his class. They re- 
minded him of “ old times,” they helped 
him to forget the humiliation of defeat, the 


In God’s Country.”' 


55 


outrage of emancipation that was to him 
nothing more than a violent confiscation of 
property. It was some small consolation 
to be able to remarh, as he frequently did, 
that, In spite of their damned meddling, 
things were not so very different after 
all.’’ 


III. 


The remaining factor in the Colonel’s 
destiny was the friends, who, like the ne- 
groes, were numerous and always with him. 
His dinners were famous in a land cele- 
brated for its cuisme. Nowhere in all the 
Bluegrass region could a saddle of south- 
down mutton be found in such juicy perfec- 
tion as on Wick Ransome’s table. His 
cellar contained an apparently inexhaust- 
ible supply of native wine ; and from a 
long, narrow closet in the dining-room came 
forth, on special occasions, imported varie- 
ties selected with the discrimination of ex- 
perience and a fastidious taste. His lavish 
hospitality, his love of good company, the 
seductive atmosphere of abundance un- 

56 


In ’‘'‘God's Coufitry," 


57 


grudgingly shared that surrounded him, 
drew about him the remnant of ante-bellum 
society that had survived defeat and loss. 
His house became the centre of the gay, 
brilliant coterie who found it possible to 
take up the old luxurious life where they 
had dropped it at the sound of “ boots and 
saddles; ” and this element was yearly re- 
inforced by the natural increase of the 
population, and the incursion of visitors 
from all parts of the country. In summer 
his house was a resort to which his city 
friends flocked, bringing horses, equipages, 
servants. Any man or woman entitled to 
the friendship of a gentleman was welcome 
to come and sojourn there indefinitely, and 
friends brought their friends. As a resort 
the place had many attractions besides the 
cellar, the well-filled table, and the deb- 
onair courtesy of the host. It was near 


58 


l7i “ God's Country." 


enough to the Kentucky River for a party 
to drive down and back in a day, taking a 
picnic dinner in the midst of wild scenery 
of unrivalled picturesqueness ; there was 
the Colonel’s handsome daughter to pre- 
side over the festivities ; the Colonel’s 
horses always at the free disposal of his 
guests ; his fish-pond, from which, even in 
midsummer, could be drawn the savory 
perch and newlight that nobody could fry 
quite so appetizingly as old Cynthy, the 
Colonel’s cook. 

No one enjoyed these annual invasions 
of his premises more than the Colonel. 
Each member of the throng that gathered 
around him felt a sort of proud proprie- 
torship in “ Wick.” 

His fine, commanding figure, his hand- 
some face radiating good-fellowship, his 
identification with the cause lost but rev- 


In “ God's Country. 


59 


erently remembered, endeared him to 
them. He was a splendid expression of 
the type of manhood they admired ; he 
was one with them in their pride of 
ancestry, their race prejudice, their views 
of government ; he represented them in 
every phase of their life, social and polit- 
ical. This feeling was made apparent to 
him in a thousand flatteries — open and 
insidious. He lived in an atmosphere of 
adulation, gratifying to his inborn love of 
supremacy, that finally became as neces- 
sary to him as the attendance of his 
servants. 

The worm in the bud of this gay, impe- 
rious life was the mortgage and the debts 
that every year became more and more of 
an incubus. Colonel Ransome could not 
understand how it was that, with four 
hundred acres of the best land in the 


6o 


In “ God's Couittry. 


State, yielding abundantly every year, and 
the annual sale of stock, from which he 
realized thousands of dollars, he could 
not “ make both ends meet.” Why the 
profits of his farm and stable did not cover 
the expense of his establishment was a 
problem with which he grappled in vain. 
It would be just as far from practical solu- 
tion on the last day of his life as in the 
hour it first confronted him. If he saw the 
necessity for curtailing expenses, he never 
found the precise time or place for putting 
on the brakes. If it occurred to him that 
the negroes who drained him and the 
friends who visited him were partially re- 
sponsible for the inadequacy of his income, 
he turned wearily from the thought as 
from an evil without remedy. If it was 
bad getting on with the negroes, getting 
on without them was impossible. The 


In “ God's Country; 


6i 


alternative of restricting himself to a rigid 
schedule of economy that would exclude 
his friends from a free participation in his 
abundance and his pleasures was so re- 
pulsive to his feelings, his taste, his con- 
ception of hospitality, that he did not 
entertain it for a moment. The few 
friends who thought they discerned, be- 
neath the purple and fine linen of high life, 
the spectre of impending bankruptcy, re- 
marked commiseratingly to each other 
that “ It was a pity Wick did not manage 
better,^’ and came down the next summer 
and preyed upon him as usual. 

Years before, the Colonel had cast a hope- 
ful eye on young Beverly Johnson, whose 
ample estate joined his own. If Beverly 
should marry Lydia, he could save her 
inheritance from the hammer; and for a 
long time her father had been unable to 


62 


I?i “ God's Country' 


see any other way out of the slough into 
which he had been steadily ploughing since 
1865. The thing had come about as he 
desired — in a perfectly simple and natural 
way, and without any interference on his 
part. Beverly and Lydia had grown up 
together, had seen each other every day of 
their lives, except when she was at school 
and he at college, during which period 
they had carried on a mildly amatory cor- 
respondence. The brief courtship that 
followed their return ended in a formal 
proposal by Beverly, who, from the first 
moment of their reunion, had been in a 
condition bordering on dementia, and its 
acceptance by Lydia, who made up for any 
lack of demonstrative fervor by a steady 
graciousness of demeanor. 

To her it seemed a matter of course that 
she should marry Bev. Next to her father 


In “ God 's Country^' 


63 


he was the handsomest man she knew. 
She sometimes wished he were an inch 
taller and had something of her father’s 
imperial manner and martial dash. But 
men like her father were rare, and Bev 
was nearer the realization of her concep- 
tion of manhood than anyone else within 
the range of her acquaintance, which was 
extensive. She would have liked him 
better had he been a part of that heroic 
struggle that raised her father above ordi- 
nary men in her eyes, but it was Bev’s 
misfortune, not his fault, that he had been 
too young to fight. He had often ex- 
pressed regret that he had not been old 
enough to take a hand in that strife, none 
the less glorious in his estimation because 
the event was dire. She was sure he 
would have made a brave soldier if he had 
had a chance ; and he was the pick of the 


64 


In “ God^s Country y 


country, everybody knew that. Because 
she considered him the pick of the country 
she had always intended marrying him. 
This intention, which had never wavered, 
dated back to her remotest remembrance. 
During the naive period of childhood she 
had frequently advised him of it, and it 
apparently met with his approval, though 
he manifested none of the enthusiasm that 
marked the subsequent interval, through 
which Lydia maintained a wary reserve 
that led him to believe she had changed 
her mind. 

It had never occurred to her that in the 
course of events he might form other 
plans. Had the thought ever come to her, 
she had enough of her father’s debonair 
confidence, and was sufficiently conscious 
of her personal advantages, to dismiss it 
without serious consideration. Though 


In “ God^s Country^ 


6s 


fond of him, her feeling was not of a 
character to disturb the even flow of her 
existence ; and she had always been too 
well assured of his devotion to experience ^ 
the thrill of triumph in its consummation 
that other women enjoy under similar cir- 
cumstances. 

In due time the lover, floating airily on 
the conviction that no other man had been 
so lucky since the rite of marriage was in- 
stituted, came to talk the affair over with 
his father-in-law-elect. It was now that 
Colonel Ransome inflicted upon himself 
the crucifixion of making a clean breast of 
the supposed secret of his impending ruin. 
Beverly was not surprised. He was not 
blind : he had seen long before where all that 
reckless extravagance must lead. The end 
was a little nearer than he thought, but it 

made no difference in his plans. He 
S 


66 


In “ God's Country. 


would be just as proud of Lyd, he 
affirmed, if she hadn’t a cent. He had 
reached that beatific state in which a man 
wants to take the world in his arms and 
kiss it, and a national panic could not have 
subdued his ardor. In a burst of generos- 
ity he proposed to take up the mortgage 
at once and relieve the Colonel from all 
further anxiety. 

“You see. Colonel,” remarked the 
young man, sagely, “it was bound to come, 
with those bloods livin’ off you all summer 
and the darkies thievin’ from you the year 
round. But you couldn’t help it. You 
can’t get rid of the niggers, and a man 
can’t ask his friends to stay at home. It 
will all be right, though. What I’ve got is 
yours if you want it ; and you can depend 
on me not to let the place go out of the 
family. I’ve had too many good times here 


In God's Country." 


67 


myself to want to see it in the ban’s of 
strangers.” 

From no other man could Colonel Ran- 
some have accepted such material consola- 
tion without the bitterest humiliation. But 
Bev was like his own son. He had spent 
almost as much of his time at the Colonel’s 
house as he had at his own. His father 
had been the Colonel’s classmate at col- 
lege, his companion-in-arms. There had 
been no stancher friend, no braver soldier, 
than Hardin Johnson ; there was no 
brighter record in all that weary struggle 
than his. When he fell in battle, it was 
to Wickliffe Ransome that he confided his 
dying messages ; and the Colonel had 
always shown an indulgent fondness for 
the son of so dear a friend, so valiant a 
soldier, even before he began to regard 
him as a possible solution of his domestic 


68 


In “ God's Country! 


problem. This affectionate interest was 
fully returned by the younger man, for 
whom his father’s friend and comrade 
embodied at once the dignity and heroism 
of a supreme struggle and the profound 
pathos of defeat. He had early discov- 
ered the weak spot in the Colonel’s char- 
acter, but loyally refrained from judging 
him. As the victim of Northern interfer- 
ence, he was entitled to indulgence and 
sympathy, and Bev was as full of excuses 
for him as Lydia herself could have been 
had she been capable of divining the ne- 
cessity for them. 

At the close of the interview that termi- 
nated with Beverly’s generous proposition. 
Colonel Ransome immediately sought his 
daughter, resolved to make an unreserved 
statement of the situation, and give Bev 
the full benefit of his handsome behavior. 


In “ God's Coufitry." 


69 


He admired the young fellow’s contempt 
for money, the youthful ardor and loverlike 
enthusiasm with which he set his sweet- 
heart above everything, in an age when 
young men were beginning to sacrifice 
their instinctive preference for beauty on 
the altar of greed. Miss Ransome lis- 
tened to her father’s recital without com- 
ment. In one aspect the situation was 
humiliating ; in another, extremely flatter- 
ing; but she could not fully appreciate it 
from either point of view. “ It was nice of 
Bev,” but it was no more than was to be 
expected of the man she had honored with 
her preference. She did not know enough 
of the value of money to measure 'the fi- 
nancial obligation ; and the privations en- 
tailed by the absence of wealth were too 
remote from her experience for her to 
realize what he had saved her from. She 


70 


In “ Qod^s Country! 


could not apprehend, so acutely as her 
father, all that was involved in the sale of 
an estate. To him it meant much more 
than the mere loss of property, though that 
was sufficiently appalling to a man of his 
tastes and habits. It meant exile from the 
only country in which living could be a 
pleasure ; it meant the abdication of the 
enviable position he held in the commu- 
nity ; it meant the immediate and perma- 
nent cessation of the ostentatious hospital- 
ity for which he was noted. These harrow- 
ing possibilities were now removed ; the 
incubus was lifted ; and he at least was not 
likely to undervalue the opportune gener- 
osity that had rescued him. 

It was now April ; Lydia and Beverly 
were to be married in October, and the 
Colonel’s face was less sternly thoughtful 
in moments of repose than it had been for 


In God's Country." 


n 


years. The usual swarm of summer visit- 
ors was expected, and preparations for 
their entertainment were going steadily for- 
ward. This would be the last summer 
Lydia would preside as hostess over the 
festivities of the dashing, convivial throng 
of “ blue-bloods " that gathered annually 
around her father’s table. She would not 
have been his daughter had she not en- 
joyed her position ; and a Southern girl at 
that age enjoys everything. She knows 
that her social career is practically finished 
when she marries, and she marries very 
young. 

She keenly realizes the exceeding brev- 
ity of that delicious interregnum between 
the authority of the parent and that of the 
husband. She knows that her social rec- 
ord must be made before it is over ; that 
*she abdicates her belleship with her nuptial 


72 


If I “ God's Country. 


vows ; that, owing to the strict code obtain- 
ing in her country, marriage, to her, is like 
death to the unconverted — it admits of no 
subsequent capitulation. The determination 
to wring this brief interval dry of enjoy- 
ment, the unwearying effort to get at the 
last sweet drop, give her an eager zest of life 
that makes her an unfailing stimulant to 
all who come in contact with her, keep her 
strung up to a pitch of enthusiasm that is 
irresistibly infectious. She has no time to 
discriminate ; everything pleases her ; she 
is never tired, never bored. She blooms 
like a cactus — all at once. Her ddbut is 
like the popping of a champagne cork. 
She imparts the effervescent sparkle of that 
incomparable vintage to the current with 
which she mingles ; she falls upon the dull 
and colorless conventions of society like a 
flash of irridescence ; with her volatile, in- 


In “ God's Cotmtry." 


73 


exhaustible flow of animal spirits she com- 
bines, within certain limits, an impetuous 
abandon that makes her the nearest ap- 
proach yet discovered to the “ Eve inno- 
cent, yet fallen ” of Chateaubriand. Be- 
fore she has time to lose the fire and fresh- 
ness of youth she is hurried away to the 
priest, and disaj^pears from the horizon 
amid the gorgeous blazonry of an elaborate 
wedding, a ceremony through which the 
groom moves meekly inconspicuous, as 
might some antique captive through the 
pomp and pageantry of a Roman triumph. 

From that moment she is a vanished de- 
light, a departed glory, a hallowed tradition 
to the men who did not achieve the sublime 
happiness of marrying her; but she is a 
queen no more. The allegiance, the hom- 
age she formerly commanded are trans- 
ferred without loss of time, and she is ever 


74 


In “ God's Country' 


after spoken of in the past tense. The 
average length of a career is three years ; 
more frequently it is but two ; often but 
one. This was Miss Ran some’s third sum- 
mer, and her last. She intended it to be a 
brilliant one. 


IV. 

It is only fair to exonerate Miss Ran- 
some from the suspicion of posing on the 
lawn for effect. She had gone there with 
the most commonplace purpose imaginable 
— that of drying the hair she had just 
washed, in the wind and sun. This 
method involved much less labor than rub- 
bing it dry with a towel, and it gave her an 
opportunity to finish at the same time the 
novel she had been reading in a desultory 
way for a week. She felt perfectly secure 
on the lawn in a pink wrapper in the 
middle of the afternoon, for the dweller in 
the country is not subject to the unexpected 
calls that make urban life a bondage. 
There was barely one chance in a hundred 
75 


76 


In “ God's Country: 


that she would be interrupted, and the 
hundredth chance had befallen. Upon re- 
flection she feared she had presented a 
very ungraceful, not to say immodest, fig- 
ure in the hammock. She would have 
given much to know just how she appeared 
to the intruder, though he was only a 
tramp. She blushed as she remembered 
the exposed foot and ankle ; and that night, 
as she stood before the mirror combing 
out the tangled mass of hair, she was 
haunted by an echo of that plaintive 
“ Liebchen, hore mich.’^ She had not 
lighted the lamp, for the moon flooded the 
room ; and when she had finished her hair, 
she sat down in the rocker by the window 
and looked out upon the moonlit garden 
and the blossomy orchard slope beyond. 

For the first time in her life something 
like a regret for the narrow limits of her 


In “ God's Country^ 


77 


experience stirred in her; but the want, 
whatever it might be, was intangible and 
undefined. What was the world like out- 
side this “garden spot” — the world from 
which he had come with his soft, pleading 
voice, and his never-to-be-forgotten song? 
Where and to whom would he next sing it 
in payment for a dinner ? 

The next morning, as Lydia and her 
father sat at breakfast, the latter remarked : 

“ Well, Lyd, I’ve got you a gardener at 
last. He don’t look like he is much ac- 
count ; but if you watch him close enough, 
maybe you can make him do till old Dave 
gets well. I met him in the road last night 
as I came home, and he asked for work. 
The po’ devil looked so hard up I thought 
I’d give him a chance.” 

“ We need somebody in the garden awful 
bad,” replied Lydia. “ When’s he cornin’?” 


78 


In “ God's Country. 


“ He’s here now. I brought him along 
with me in the buggy, an’ told him he 
could sleep in Schneider’s cabin.” 

“ He’s white, then.” 

“ Yes, and Dutch as kraut. I told him 
to go round to the garden as soon as he 
got his breakfast, an* you’d give him his 
orders.” 

It was a warm, bright morning, the sort 
of day that, coming early in spring, fills the 
amateur florist with feverish activity ; and 
as soon as breakfast was over, Lydia, 
happy in the knowledge that at last she 
had somebody to do what was so needed, 
hurried out in the pink wrapper of yester- 
day and an ample sun-bonnet to pounce 
greedily on the new man, and get as much 
as possible out of him in the shortest space 
of time. The portion set apart for flowers 
was the lower end of the garden proper ; a 


In “ God's Coimtry. 


79 


large square of ground running up into the 
angle formed by the L of the house and 
laid off geometrically, in beds with blue- 
grass borders, and earthen walks between. 
In the center stood a circular frame cov- 
ered with a mat of honeysuckle, offering a 
refreshing shelter from the sun, which was 
getting very hot. She drew a rustic seat 
into the shadow and waited. In a few 
minutes she heard the click of the garden 
gate, and, looking up, saw the tramp of 
yesterday approaching leisurely, a knot of 
pink ribbon in his button-hole. The blood 
surged up into her temples as she remarked 
his decoration and noted the exact spot 
upon her gown from which it had disap- 
peared. By this time he had reached her 
and had bared his fine head with the in- 
imitable gesture that had won him his din- 
ner the day before. For some reason it 


8o 


In “ God^s Country^ 


did not impress her now as then. The 
pink ribbon that would have been, a roman- 
tic and inoffensive fancy in a picturesque 
vagabond who was nothing to her was 
egregious presumption in her servant, and 
she resented it. Moreover, she was ex- 
tremely mortified at having spent an after- 
noon in rearing a dream palace about a 
person “ as Dutch as kraut,” in whom her 
father had instantly recognized “ a po’ 
devil,” and nothing more ; whom her father 
held in that compassionate contempt that 
was more damning than denunciation. 

She understood perfectly that the only 
thing to do was to ignore the decoration ; 
but the chill of November was in her man- 
ner as she rose and proceeded to give di- 
rections in a cold, peremptory tone she 
never thought of using to the negroes. He 
stood meanwhile hat in hand, his attitude 


In “ God^s Country. 


8i 


the supreme expression of respectful atten- 
tion. He was not looking at her, but she 
could just catch a gleam in his eye that 
contradicted, effaced his assumption of 
humility. It first puzzled, then annoyed 
her, until her eye chanced to fall upon the 
bosom of her dress, where, withered, for- 
gotten, but clamorous of injudicious inter- 
est, drooped the violets she had picked up 
from the step. The blood mounted again 
under the sun-bonnet, but she went on giv- 
ing her orders, and presently unfastened 
the flowers, and tossed them carelessly 
where he could not fail to see them. When 
he began work she went back to the rustic 
seat under the honeysuckle, and sat watch- 
ing him from the shadow. She was ill at 
ease. The illusions of yesterday had been 
rudely dissipated : the romantic vagabond 

had sunk to the level of a common laborer ; 

6 


82 


In “ God^s Country! 


the troubadour was extinguished in the 
Dutchman who had slept in the cabin with 
Schneider. Had he belonged to any other 
nationality it would not have been so bad. 
She had seen but few Germans, and those 
of the lowest class. There was no room in 
her narrow experience for comparison, for 
discrimination. Schneider had been there 
a year, and he had been treated in all re- 
spects as one of the negroes, except that in 
consideration of his white skin he had been 
given a bed to himself and allowed to eat 
at the Colonel’s table after the family were 
through. Even the negroes looked down 
upon a ‘‘white nigga.” The condition of 
servitude was the paramount fact that fixed 
a man’s place in the social scale; but a 
white servant was an anomaly, a foreigner 
was an uncertain quantity in the social 
equation, he was not quite as good as a 


In “ God's Country." 


83 


negro. This man was Schneider’s country- 
man and fellow-servant, and she had worn 
his violets, and he had seen them. He was 
not like Schneider. She knew that as well 
to-day as she did yesterday ; but it could 
make no difference so long as he was her 
father’s servant. She was humiliated by 
his discovery of the interest she had felt in 
him the day before, and she decided that 
his immediate dismissal was the only thing 
that could reinstate her in her own estima- 
tion. 

She had been so occupied with these 
thoughts that, although looking directly at 
him, she had not noticed that he was 
ruthlessly spading up the young seedling 
verbenas she had intended transplanting. 
She saw it now and rushed fiercely to the 
rescue, glad of an opportunity to find 
fault with another than herself. 


84 


In “ God's Coufitryl 


“You are buryin^ all my verbenas,” 
she called, in a tone of vexation. 

“ W’ich is dose ? ” he asked humbly, and 
the voice was irresistibly softening. 

“ These with the rough leaves,” she 
replied, taking a trowel, with which she 
began digging them up out of his way. 

He examined the plant closely, and 
then with another trowel began digging, 
and did not attempt to use the spade 
again until sure there was not another 
verbena in the bed. 

After this experience she dared not 
leave him alone in the garden. She 
stayed by him all day, jealously watching 
every movement of spade or hoe. He 
was so obliging, so eager to please, so 
remorseful for the plants irrecoverably 
buried, that she could but pardon his 
ignorance. This was the more easily 


In “ God'^s Counfry” 


8s 


done as the day wore on, and there was 
nothing after that one unguarded glance 
to remind her of the unbecoming interest 
she had inadvertently betrayed. The pink 
ribbon was still in view, but after a time 
she did not notice that. His name was 
Karl, and she thought it had a pretty 
sound when he pronounced it. His voice 
was as winning when he spoke as when he 
sang. She liked to hear him talk ; and 
when the irritation of the morning began 
to wear off, she kept him answering 
questions, that she might be amused by 
his doubtful struggle with a strange 
tongue. The peculiar modulation of his 
voice, the softening of the consonants, the 
lingual caress on certain vowels, his odd 
application of the words themselves, were 
as ingratiating as the imperfect utterance 
jof a child. Her English was no better 


86 


In “ God's Country^ 


than his, though it was different, and she 
did not have a monopoly of amusement. 
What he knew of the language he had 
learned according to the stiff and formal 
manner of books, and her idioms, her 
provincialisms, her continual slurring of 
consonants when she did not drop them 
altogether, as she invariably did at the 
end of a word or syllable, the blurring of 
vowels and the substituting of one vowel 
sound for another, — presented a unique 
variation of speech that seemed to occupy 
a middle ground between the language 
proper and the dialect spoken by the 
negroes. He wondered whether she would 
be able to read it were it spelled out to her 
phonetically, and finally decided that she 
would not ; but it was not unpleasant to 
hear as she uttered it, with her soft intona- 
tion and lingering drawl. 


Li “ God's Country," 




Karl worked much more briskly than 
old Dave ; and Lydia^ surprised when 
night came at what he had accomplished, 
determined to keep him till the end of the 
week, by which time they might find some 
one else. She hovered about him' contin- 
ually, in the fear of further depredation to 
her flowers ; but he was so careful, dis- 
played so much energy, such marvellous 
quickness in learning, so much obliging 
readiness, and was withal so apparently 
oblivious of the initial incident of their 
acquaintance during those days of proba- 
tion, that, when the end of the week came, 
she had decided that he might stay until 
the garden was all in. In the first shock 
of dicosvery she had unduly magnified a 
circumstance that was beneath her notice. 
She saw it now in its real significance, 
which was slight, and she knew it was not 


88 


In “ God's Country." 


likely they would find anyone who would 
do better than he. There was no telling 
when old Dave would be well enough 
to go to work ; he was not worth much at 
his best; and they were already much 
behind with the kitchen-garden, which in 
summer was the principal source of sup- 
ply. 

Lydia’s enthusiasm in the culture of 
flowers amounted to a passion. With most 
women, flowers are either a sentiment or a 
decoration. To Lydia they were living 
things, each one of which had a biography. 
She knew every plant in her collection 
intimately, and remembered where and 
when it had come into her possession. 
Many of them she had bought at the 
greenhouses, but there were others which 
combined the sentimental associations of 
a souvenir with the zest and pleasure 


In “ God's Country," 


89 


incidental to acquiring a new variety. 
When presented with a bouquet, she 
searched it carefully to see if it contained 
anything she did not have. If it did, the 
slips were stuck down somewhere to grow. 
She was remarkably successful, and was 
proud of her garden, which was her chief 
occupation and keenest pleasure. It en- 
gaged her to the exclusion of the men- 
agerie of pets upon which girls of her age 
usually fritter away their time and the 
emotional activity of adolescence. Its 
interest could not be fathomed by one 
ignorant of the subject or less enthusiastic 
than herself. The fancy was not an inex- 
pensive one ; but her father, who took a 
pride in denying her nothing that money 
could procure, humored it as he had once 
humored a similar fancy in the direction of 
music. As Lyd’s hobby he looked upon 


90 


In “ God's Country." 


it with benign tolerance ; but Dave was 
not so indulgent. He regarded the flower 
garden as a nuisance and an imposition, 
since it added to his labors and brought 
no return that he could appreciate. His 
indignation, when first informed that he 
would be expected to attend to it, was 
boundless ; and though he did not openly 
rebel he maintained from first to last an 
attitude of sullen reluctance that was a 
continual trial to Lydia and acted like a 
cold compress on her enthusiasm. Noth- 
ing could have recommended the new 
gardener more effectively than the cheerful 
activity he displayed in this particular spot, 
dear to her heart but despised of all men. 
The sympathy and the ardor he manifested 
in the pursuit of his occupation were a con- 
tinual surprise and delight to her. She 
could not understand it. In a community 


In “ God's Country. 





where labor still had all the terror of tire 
primeval curse, it seemed marvellous that 
a man should take pleasure in anything 
involving toil. She liked to worlc in the 
garden ; but then the flowers were hers, 
and when she did not want to work she 
could be idle. It was different with Karl. 
The vegetable garden claimed a large part 
of his time, especially as they were a little 
later than usual getting it in. Some- 
times for several days together he would 
be engaged there, and if, after he had 
finished his day’s work, she called on him 
to water the flowers, not without some 
slight compunction, he responded with a 
smiling alacrity that almost took her 
breath. He was never too tired to serve 
her ; it was never too early in the morning 
or too late at night for her to command him 
to the utmost extent of his ability. When 


92 


In “ God^s Country' 


she repeatedly changed her mind about 
the filling of a basket or the laying-off of a 
bed, he addressed himself to the one- 
hundreth whim with the same smiling 
assiduity that had distinguished his first 
attempt. She had never seen anything 
like it in her life. It was beyond her com- 
prehension, but it was intensely gratifying ; 
and in addition to its practical value, his 
willingness had the engaging interest of a 
new study. She found too that he could 
talk intelligently about flowers, and that 
he liked to talk about them. This was a 
pleasure she had never before enjoyed. 
She had no means of knowing whether 
this enthusiasm was real or assumed. She 
could not know that he would have shown 
the same absorbing interest in pig-iron had 
she chosen to discuss it with him ; but she 
did observe that frequently, in an animated 


In “ God^s Country, 


93 


debate about a plant or a plan, the arbi- 
trary distinction of mistress and servant 
seemed to melt away. 

One of Lydia’s horticultural triumphs 
•was the fern-bed, which filled the angle 
formed by the L of the house. Most per- 
sons found ferns difficult to manage, and, 
after one or two ineffectual attempts to 
transplant them, gave them up. But Lydia 
persisted, and finally stumbled on the 
secret of “ leaf-mould ” and old roots. 
The success was not attained without great 
perseverance and much patient care, and 
every spring a part of the bed had to be 
replanted. The ferns grew in abundance 
along the creek, which was one of the 
many branches of the Elkhorn ; and Lydia 
took the liveliest pleasure in hunting them 
in the secluded and picturesque nooks 
among the boldest of the cliffs. Other 


94 


In “ God’s Country- 


wild things grew along the creek that were 
equally desirable additions to her ornamen- 
tal baskets, among them the moss with 
which she lined her wire hanging-baskets, 
and the trailing ground-ivy that could be 
used effectively in so many ways. During 
the spring and summer she made numerous 
excursions in search of moss and roots, 
attended by old Dave, who drove the phae- 
ton, carried the baskets, and added the 
feeling of security only to be provided by 
the shadow of a human presence to what 
had in other respects all the charm of a 
solitary ramble. She enjoyed these trips 
intensely, but the pleasure was always 
more or less dashed with compunction for 
dragging Dave’s rheumatic legs over those 
sharp ledges: and Dave groaned and 
grunted so continually that she was never 
for a moment allowed to forget that she 


In “ God’s Country’’ 


95 


was victimizing him in the pursuit of some- 
thing which, when found, was utterly worth- 
less. With Karl it was the reverse : he 
was delighted to hunt for ferns. Nothing 
suited him so well. It was clear, though 
he never gave verbal expression to the sen- 
timent, that no occupation within the com- 
pass of invention was so entirely to his 
taste. She could go with him where she 
could not go with Dave, for Dave could 
not climb over the roughest places, and 
she was afraid to go alone. Karl was 
strong and agile, and could assist her over 
heights she could not climb by herself; 
and had she not been too much occupied 
with other things she would probably have 
noticed the assiduity with which he 
searched out such points. Where Dave 
had dragged his creaking joints laboriously 
after her, Karl, lithe and agile as a cat, 


96 


In “ God^s Country.'^ 


went before, making a path by parting the 
thick branches and holding them while she 
passed. The number of delicate, unobtru- 
sive attentions with which he made shift to 
pave the ascent or descent was truly mar- 
vellous, had she paused to consider it. 
Here in the woods she found it difficult to 
maintain the strict relation of mistress 
and servant. Here was a subtle change of 
attitude defined by no overt act. Away 
from his tools, his work, and the dominant 
thought of servitude, Karl was again a 
handsome vagabond, who might be a 
prince in disguise. The servile manner so 
rigidly observed in the presence of others, 
here gave place to a knightly courtesy, 
tinged at times with a boyish audacity that 
was never pushed to a point where she 
could afford to resent it. He seemed to 
know the exact point at which to pause or 


I7t God's Country' 


97 


change his manner. His tact, his facility 
in retreat, amounted to genius. Her face 
was an open page, which he read with 
unfailing accuracy, and he was duly heed- 
ful of its signals. 

She was a well-balanced, self-reliant girl, 
but there were moments in which she felt 
that he had her at a disadvantage, when 
she suspected that his soul was not as 
guileless as his face, that his arts were 
many and were deep. They certainly 
were the more seductive for that infantile 
imperfection of speech. There were 
times when the arbitrary convention that 
separated them seemed flimsier than cob- 
web, lighter than thistledown ; and she felt 
that, if he chose to whistle it down the 
wind, she would be powerless to preserve 
it. She was too clear-headed not to real- 
ize fhe heightened zest, the exhilaration, 
7 


98 


In “ God's Coutitry: 


with which Karl’s presence invested 
these rambles ; and she had no sooner 
admitted it to herself than she began to 
beat up a reason. She found one, and 
it was not only very simple but perfectly 
satisfactory : it was because Karl was so 
much more active and willing than Dave, 
and with him she could go to so many 
places inaccessible to her before. 


V. 


The gardener and Schneider were the 
only white hands on the place. When the 
latter first came they did not know just 
what to do with him. He could not of 
course lodge in the Colonel’s house, 
though it was ample and almost empty. 
He was finally bestowed in the “ fur 
cabin,” the last of the line of low log 
rooms that had served as negro quarters in 
slave time. The local prejudice in favor 
of a white skin had obtained for him some 
concessions in the shape of additional 
furniture, and Meriky, the house girl, had 
been told that she was to look after the 
room ; but from the time of his moving 
in, nobody at the house had given a 
99 


lOO 


In “ God's Country'' 


thought to Schneider or his lodging ; and 
Meriky, with the supreme disdain of her 
race for ‘‘po’ white trash,’’ ignored the 
order without scruple, affirming with many 
scornful sniffs and tosses that she “ wan’t 
gwine to wait on no white nigga.” 

One afternoon, about two weeks after 
the arrival of Karl, Lydia chanced to pass 
by the cabin, the door of which was open. 
The bed was unmade, the floor unswept, 
and the room had a shocking appearance 
of squalor and untidiness. 

“ I declare it’s a shame ; Meriky ought 
to ten’ to this cabin ; an’ she must,” said 
Lydia, mortified by the knowledge that 
any white person had been so lodged on 
her father’s place. 

As she passed the window she saw two 
books lying on the table near it. The 
text was German, but she could see that it 


In ‘‘ God^s Country! 


lOI 


was verse, and could make out on the 
respective title-pages the names of Heine 
and Goethe. There was no name on 
the fly-leaves to indicate the ownership, 
but she was sure they were KarPs. She 
picked up one of them, and as she care- 
lessly turned it over a bunch of violets 
tied with a blade of grass dropped out. 

It had not before occurred to her that 
Schneider suffered any indignity in being 
thus bestowed ; even now she thought that, 
with a thorough overhauling, the place 
might be made habitable for him : but 
she felt that his countryman was entitled 
to something better, and she was in- 
spired with a bold resolve to move him 
into the room over the kitchen, which 
had never been used for anything and was 
conveniently accessible by the stairway 
leading up from the back porch. 


102 


l7i “ God^s Country- 


That afternoon she marshalled three 
negro women into the large, low-ceiled, 
barn-like room over the kitchen, which was 
speedily swept, scoured, and furnished 
with articles excavated from the lumber 
room. A splendid mahogany bedstead 
with elaborately carved posts towered in 
one corner ; a quaint claw-foot bureau, that 
like the bedstead had retired before newer 
fancies in furniture, kept it company ; and 
a washstand was improvised from a 
rosewood table, whose cracked slab of 
Egyptian marble had condemned it to 
banishment in the dim regions of the attic. 
The collection of odd chairs, the furniture 
belonging to different periods, the green 
Venetian blinds at the windows, gave the 
room a bizarre appearance. Lydia 
thought it looked very much like a lumber 
room, but it was Letter than the cabin, 


In “ God's Country. 


103 


and it was near enough for her to see that 
Meriky attended to it properly. 

That night, as Karl proceeded to move 
his belongings, consisting of the two books 
and a small bundle of clothing, from the 
cabin to the house, Schneider, after look- 
ing at him stolidly for a moment, asked, 
“ You vas bromoded, ain’d ud ? ” 

Karl nodded, and as he turned his back 
on the cabin and crossed the moonlit 
stretch of lawn that lay between it and 
the house, Schneider shook his head 
solemnly, and added, “ Somepody elz haf 
vound you oud already.” 

The house had two long porches facing 
east and west, which enabled Lydia to 
follow the shadow on warm days. The 
east porch led directly into the garden, 
and here, through the long afternoons, 
as she sat with her novel or her embroid- 


104 


In “ Gol’s Cou7itry^ 


ery, she could see the gardener at his 
work, hear him humming softly to himself 
as he scraped the earthen walks or 
trimmed the bluegrass borders of the 
flower-beds. She was often moved to ask 
him to sing again the song that still 
haunted her, but she never did, and she 
could not tell why she did not. In spite of 
his steady application to work, his growing 
efliciency, his habitual attitude of defer- 
ence, he was an embarrassing element. 
Unaccustomed to the service of white 
people, she experienced a hesitancy in 
giving orders that was absent from her 
intercourse with the negroes. Many 
services rendered by Dave she could not 
exact of Karl ; and whenever she found 
herself manoeuvring to save him from the 
more menial offices of his position, she 
reflected with a twinge of mortification 


In “ God's Country 


>> 


105 


that she was exhibiting an undue interest 
in her father’s servant. The feeling would 
have been the same toward any white 
person in the station her education and 
prejudices inclined her to regard as the 
exclusive heritage of the negro. In the 
case of Karl it was the more pronounced 
because she had seen him first in the 
light of an interesting vagabond, bearing 
himself with the chivalric reverence of 
a knight-errant. She had at times an 
uneasy sense of being open to his criticism. 
She never attempted to sing when he was 
near; she seldom sang at all. After the 
mellow resonance of his voice, her own 
sounded thin and weak. She felt in a 
vague way that he was capable of com- 
paring her with some standard of which 
she had no conception, and it annoyed 
her. She realized to some extent how 


io6 


I?i God’s Cou7itry.” 


far his knowledge of the world, of every- 
thing, exceeded her own, and it irritated 
her beyond measure. She felt, though she 
did not admit it, that in some respects 
he was superior to many men she recog- 
nized as equals ; but the same fipe intui- 
tion that discovered this superiority showed 
her that it could not be made apparent to 
anyone else. As she was the only one of 
the family who came in contact with him, 
she was the only one to discover what her 
father would have been slow to detect 
in any case — the intangible charm she felt 
but could not define. The qualities that 
contributed to it would not commend him 
to the regard of those around her. To 
the men of her acquaintance he would not 
seem more worthy because he loved flow- 
ers, read Heine, of whom they knew noth- 
ing, sang divinely, and handled the guitar 


In “ God's Country." 


107 


with inimitable grace. Any one of his 
accomplishments would be sufficient to 
condemn him in the eyes of those who 
would consider them not only trivial, but 
unmanly, and she was secretly chagrined 
that she 'had found them admirable. 

Dinner was just over, and Colonel Ran- 
some, on the eve of his second toilet for 
the day, went first to one window then to 
another, scanning the premises for a loiter- 
ing negro, but found none. He called 
several times, loudly and in rapid succes- 
sion, but there was no response. “ It’s 
come to a pretty pass,” he complained, 
“ when a man keeps a whole brigade of 
black devils round him and can’t find one 
to black his shoes.” He came out upon 
the east porch, and was pacing helplessly 
up and down, with the shoes in his hand, 
when Karl came through the garden gate. 


io8 


In “ God's Coujitry^' 


“ Here, Karl,” he called, “ black iriy 
shoes, quick.” 

Miss Ran some, still in the dining-room, 
where she was serving the allowance of 
sugar and butter for the negroes, and put- 
ting the remainder safe under Tock and 
key, heard the order, and started as from 
the stroke of a lash. She went to the 
kitchen door and found Tom, who had fin- 
ished his dinner, asleep, with his head in 
his plate. 

“ Tom,” she called, “ come here this 
minute and black yuh Mahs Wick’s shoes.” 

On her way back to the dining-room she 
passed Karl, who had already picked up 
the shoes, and was looking for the blacking 
in the closet under the stairway. 

“ Put ’em down,” she said, angrily. 
“You can hitch up the pha’ton, an’ I’ll go 
after those ferns this evenin’ ” (afternoon). 


In “ God's Coimtryl 


109 


The phaeton was soon ready, and they 
drove silently down the avenue, across the 
pike, and into a lane bordered with a close 
growth of locust and fragrant feathery 
sprays of elder-bloom. Karl would always 
remember the avenue as it looked on the 
day he entered it a beggar — before he had 
dreamed of the supreme bliss of driving 
through the shady byways of “ God’s 
Country ” with the most beautiful woman 
his eyes had ever beheld. What if she 
did not know how he adored her ? What 
if she did despise him for his coarse 
clothes, but most of all for the service to 
herself, in the rendering of which he found 
his keenest pleasure ? What if the preju- 
dice and bigotry that were hers by inheri- 
tance and education kept her blind to the 
truth ? kept her fighting against the influ- 
ence she felt but could not understand ? 


no 


In “ God’s Country! 


What if she saw only the uncouth attire of 
him whose soul was exhaled before her 
daily in the priceless incense of a passion 
that exacted nothing ? It could not abate 
one vibration of the exquisite emotion that 
thrilled him as he looked out over the 
green fields, felt the breath of heaven on 
his face, and revelled in the exhilarating 
contact of Lydia’s dress, or trembled at the 
light, accidental touch of her arm or shoul- 
der as the vehicle bounded over the un- 
even road. He knew that in the autumn 
she was to marry the handsome young fel- 
low whose amiable arrogance he thought 
detestable ; but he did not allow that event 
to thrust its gaunt shadow into the present, 
which was his. They drove through a 
mile of lane and across a field of purple 
clover, to the bluff that overhung the 
creek, where they hitched the horse. 


In “ God's Country! 


Ill 


Lydia had not spoken since they started, 
and Karl saw that the wind was in the 
east, but he did not know why it had 
shifted. Lydia was in a tempestuous state 
of mind. Why had she interfered about 
those shoes ? She was beginning to fear 
that in the shock of surprise at her father^s 
order she had shown more feeling than 
was necessary or becoming. She won- 
dered if Karl had noticed it, and how he 
would construe it. As usual, she saw fit to 
counteract the effect of any trivial kindness 
she had shown him, by a lofty remoteness 
of demeanor. She understood the diffi- 
culty of carrying out the determination in 
this particular spot — understood that it 
would spoil the afternoon for herself as 
well as for him ; but she was none the less 
resolved. She began by ignoring the path 
he opened for her as usual, and struck out 


II2 


In “ God's Country^ 


in another direction, though the formation 
of the cliff was such that they could at no 
point in the descent be more than three 
feet apart. At the bottom of the precipice 
the creek unfolded itself like a green rib- 
bon, between white ledges of limestone ; 
and deep down, where perpetual twilight 
brooded, lay the dim, cool regions of moss 
and fern. From the midst of the dusky 
solitude the white arms of a sycamore, now 
hidden, now revealed, by the waving of 
boughs, shone like the gleaming limbs of a 
dryad vanishing coyly at their approach. 
The thicket w^as alive with the brush of 
wings, and vocal with the reed choir of 
the woods. The place was unspeakably 
lovely in the green luxuriance of full foli- 
age, but she carried with her a jarring 
thought that made her indifferent to its 
beauty. It was probably owing to the 


In God''s Country- 




1 13 


vexation incidental to the inopportune 
necessity for making herself disagreeable 
that she walked so absently, and over- 
looked the grape-vine upon which she 
tripped. Karl turned, and stayed her with 
his hand, but they both slipped from the 
path, borne on by the impetus of her fall. 
It was impossible to be imposing or lofty 
to a man who held her suspended over a 
chasm, and Lydia felt her dignity melting 
like thin ice. The descent was very abrupt, 
the mould soft and treacherous, and they 
could not stand in one place long enough 
to get an advantageous start. They were 
still slipping, when Karl caught her with 
one arm and grasped the limb of a tree 
with the other hand. For an instant she 
felt his breath upon her face, and then she 
was being whirled, carried bodily, down the 

steep bluff. She was not thinking of the 
8 


In “ God^s Country. 


114 


descent or its perils. She was conscious 
only of the contact ; her head was dizzy 
and her veins ran fire. It was but an in- 
stant. It was like a flash. They reached 
the bottom with no more serious injury 
than a few scratches, and lit upon their 
feet. Lydia was trembling violently, and 
for her life she could not look at Karl. 
He stood beside her, thrilling with the re- 
membrance of that embrace, the more de- 
licious because of the danger that attended 
it. She did not speak, and the face that 
would have been a revelation to him was 
hidden by the sun-bonnet. To Lydia the 
sensation was altogether new, and it was as 
unfathomable as it was unfamiliar. It 
seemed in some vague way connected with 
the strange spell that always settled down 
upon them at the edge of this sylvan soli- 
tude, where the coercive energy of nature 


In ‘‘ God's Country, 


f) 


IIS 


thrust out all arbitrary distinctions and 
brought her face to face with something 
feared and yet desired. Karl, uncertain of 
her mood, was discreetly silent. They 
worked for an hour in the cool, fragrant 
dusk of the ravine, with the ribbon of water 
below and the ribbon of sky above. The 
longer they kept silent the harder it was to 
speak ; and when at last Karl announced 
that the baskets were full, his voice 
sounded unfamiliar to Lydia, but it broke 
the spell and brought her back to the level 
of the commonplace. They started home 
immediately, not tarrying for the usual 
stroll after the baskets were filled. There 
were more baskets than Karl could carry 
at once, and rather than wait to send him 
back, she took up the smallest one herself. 

She found it heavier than she expected, 
and, when half-way up the cliff, sank on a 


ii6 In God's Country'' 


ledge to rest. Karl followed her example. 
The cliff was much lower on the other side 
of the creek at this point, and the view 
commanded a wide, sun-flooded plateau, 
carved into fantastic arabesques by the 
erratic windings of the Elkhorn. The 
shadows of flying clouds chased each other 
over golden billows of wheat and barley 
and far-reaching fields of dark, luxuriant 
hemp that broke into a thousand whirling 
eddies at the touch of every breeze. 

A soft, luminous blue mist floated like a 
gauze streamer along the watercourse, and 
hovered over the slight depressions in the 
land ; and the deserted log cabin standing 
in the midst of the stretch of purple clover 
in the creek bottom looked like some rude 
craft afloat on a sea of amethyst. The 
shrill bird chorus was pierced by occa- 
sional bursts of song as the ambitious solo 


In “ God’s Country.” 


117 


of the mocking-bird rose in a succession of 
imitative phrases, and joined now and then 
by the plaintive contralto note of the dove 
calling across the field behind them. 
Down at the creek’s edge a negro woman 
was hanging up the weekly wash, and from 
under the kettles fluttered up the blue, 
odorous smoke of a wood fire. After it 
soared a voice powerful, penetrating, and 
slightly nasal, but not unpleasant, bearing 
upward the burden of a favorite plantation 
hymn ; 

“ I’se gwyne home to glory, don’t you grieve arter 
me, 

I’se gwyne home to glory, don’t you grieve arter 
me, 

I’se gwyne home to glory, don’t you grieve arter 
me, 

’Ca’se I do’ want you to grieve arter me.” 

She sang with power and earnestness, 
and no combination of intervals could 


In “ God's Country: 


1 18 


convey an adequate impression of her 
treatment of that final “ me,” which she 
prolonged indefinitely, ornamented with 
innumerable shakes and appoggiaturas, 
held aloft in a piercing tremulo, and 
finally, when breath was exhausted, heaved 
upward with a jerk. 

A light breeze blew over them, bringing 
with it the clean, strong, penetrating smell 
of hemp. Karl took off his hat and drew 
in a deep breath. 

“ You are right to call it God’s country,” 
he said. “ It is beautiful ; it is like Para- 
dise.” 

Lydia had taken off the sun-bonnet to 
which he so objected, and was fanning her- 
self with it vigorously. Her eyes were 
fixed on a distant point in the landscape, 
and her face was stamped with the apa- 
thetic calm of a reactive mood. 


In “ God^s Country! 


1 19 


Karl scanned it intently, but for once 
could make nothing of it. It neither en- 
couraged nor repelled him. 

Presently he said in an absent way, as if 
to nobody in particular, “ I am glad I found 
God’s country. Dis is de happies’ summer 
I did eher know.” 

Lydia turned, and looked down at him 
curiously. He was lying on his back look- 
ing up at the strip of sky, and his eyes re- 
flected its deep, luminous blue. His face 
wore that bland and guileless expression 
so impossible to construe with certainty. 
Was he joking ? If this was the happiest 
summer he had ever known, what must his 
life have been ? His visible vestments 
were a shirt of unbleached cotton, a pair of 
blue-cotton trousers, coarse but clean, and 
a pair of calfskin shoes. How could any- 
body be happy like that? If this was 


120 


In ^^God^s Country.^' 


happiness, she was more curious than ever 
to know what his life had been. She was 
moved to ask him a question that had long 
been at the tip of her tongue : 

“ What did you do in your own coun- 
try?” 

Karl replied that, when not wandering 
about, he had been in the army. 

Her eyes brightened : if he had been a 
soldier, that was not so bad. 

“ Did you like being in the army ? ” 

“ No,” he answered, simply, “ de disci- 
pline is ve’y strict.” 

“ How came you to join the army ? ” 

He replied that every man in his country 
had to serve a certain length of time, 
whether he liked it or not. 

There had always been lurking in her 
mind a suspicion that in his own country 
his position had been different from what 


In “ God's Country." 


I2I 


it was here. He certainly was not like 
Schneider, and she had fancied that at 
home he might at least have been a gentle- 
man ; but as he answered her questions 
the last vestige of the illusion she had en- 
tertained vanished like a faint odor in a 
gale. If this was the happiest summer he 
had ever known, he could not have been 
any better off in his own country ; and the 
man who was not a fighter from instinct 
and a soldier from choice was less than a 
man to her. How could he prefer this to 
being in the army ? He had probably de- 
serted; that was why he was an exile. 
Never again would she find a peg upon 
which to hang a romantic possibility. She 
looked down upon him as he lay there gaz- 
ing up into the sky ; and he was so pitiably 
content, so egregiously happy, that she 
hated him. She turned impatiently away 


122 


In “ God's Country." 


from a spectacle so irritating, and leaned 
over the ledge to look into the chasm. 
Half-way down the side of the clilf, which 
was almost perpendicular, some pale-blue 
flowers waved from a crevice in the rock. 
She had never seen any like them before, 
though she had been so often to the place, 
and they roused the interest that nothing 
else could have stimulated at that moment. 

“ Look there ! ” she exclaimed, impul- 
sively ; “ I wonder what they are like when 
you get close to ’em } What a pity they 
are jus’ where we can’t get at ’em from 
above or below ! ” 

From the point where they sat to the 
bed of the creek was a sheer drop of sev- 
enty-five feet, and the cliff, though covered 
with a scant vegetation that found a foot- 
hold in the crevices of rock, was too nearly 
straight to climb ; and the flowers, inacces- 


In ’‘'‘God's Country! 


123 


sible from any direction, nodded gayly in 
exasperating security. 

“ I do wish I had some of ’em,” said 
Lydia, earnestly, the more eager because 
they were so entirely out of reach. 

Karl leaned over the edge. “ Dose blue 
ones ? ” he asked. 

“ Yes, with the long stems. Ain’t they 
lovely ? ” 

He reached out and caught the top of a 
supple young sapling that grew in a crevice 
below them, and before she had finished 
the question he had swung himself over 
the ledge. 

The drop almost took her breath. With 
bloodless face she leaned over the edge, 
straining her eyes for a glimpse of him. In 
a second the sapling came whizzing back 
to its place, lashing the intervening brush 
tremendously, almost striking her in the 


124 


In “ God^s Country! 


face. Below there was a similar snapping 
of branches that filled her with terror. 
With the fascination of horror, she leaned 
over and looked again. Far below she saw 
him swinging by a limb, working himself 
back and forth toward the cranny from 
which the flowers seemed to beckon deri- 
sively. The first time he did not reach 
them by two feet ; the next time he got 
nearer ; the third time he touched the rock 
but missed the prize, and Lydia, straining 
her eyes through the brush, could see that 
the root of the young tree by which he 
swung was yielding. He did not see the 
danger, and she could not call to him, she 
was so paralyzed with fear. He was swing- 
ing toward the rock for the fourth time — 
but she could look no longer. She drew 
back and listened breathlessly for what 
seemed an age. Deep in the ravine she 


In “ God's Country." 


125 


heard a pheasant drumming ; the dove 
called across the wood ; the negro woman 
at the creek’s edge rang out the vociferous 
“ Don’t you grieve arter me,” which all at 
once seemed to take on a sinister meaning 
— and then the crash came. 

She turned suddenly cold and sick, and’ 
a black curtain fell between her and the 
landscape. 

Meanwhile Karl, who had in the nick 
of time seized another sapling, and thus 
achieved a safe but precipitous descent, 
was leisurely climbing back to the top. 
Several minutes elapsed while Lydia lay 
pale and unconscious ; then the cool wind 
blowing on her face revived her. She sat 
up feebly, and was just beginning to re- 
member why she had fainted, and that in 
the ravine below lay the mangled remains 
of Karl, when she looked up and saw him 


126 


In “ God's Country' 


so close to her that she could have touched 
him. The transition from sickening ter- 
ror to infinite relief, to something more 
than relief, was so sudden and so violent 
that Karl was thrilled by both in the same 
instant. The deadly fear, the joyful light 
that burned in her eyes a moment later, 
were alike for him. His own face reflected 
the glow of hers ; it shone with a new light, 
eager, intense. For a moment they looked 
at each other ; then he asked, “ Were you 
frightened ^ " 

The question came softly and with just 
the touch of tenderness sufficient to betray 
his thought. Her face changed instantly. 

“It was enough to frighten anybody,'’ 
she replied. “ And what a perfec’ly ridic- 
ulous thing it was to do ! ” 

He held out the blue flowers mutely and 
with a penitent face. 


In “ God's Country^ 


127 


She hesitated a moment, then took them 
and stuck them carelessly in her belt. He 
was safe now and she could afford to be 
rigorous. 

On the way home she sat up rigidly in 
the phaeton and did not speak to him, and 
bitterly resented the fact that Karl, though 
silent and thoughtful, seemed oblivious of 
her displeasure. 

That night in the room over the kitchen 
a young man, with head bared to the 
caress of the fragrant summer breeze, 
leaned out of the small square window into 
the moonlight and hummed snatches of a 
melody in the intervals of a fragmentary 
soliloquy. “ Her face was glorious,” he 
was saying. “ She lofes me and she 
despises herself. She will be very haugh- 
ty, very grand, now for a long time. It is 
curious, dis pride, dis grand air. In dis 


128 


In “ God's Country'' 


country dey say all people are de same, but 
it is not so. Because I wear dese clothes 
and dig in her garden, she despises me. 
It is very funny, dese Americans. I might 
despise her, but I don^t. But I hate him. 
He ’ink de world was made for him. 
He is a conceited jackanape.” 

In the white-curtained room at the front 
of the house sat Lydia, rocking vigorously, 
looking out upon the moonlit garden, glanc- 
ing occasionally at the window at the end 
of the porch, upon the sill of which she 
thought a head rested. She too was think- 
ing of the incident of the afternoon. She 
was unable to guess how Karl had man- 
aged to reach the bottom of the cliff alive, 
but she would not have betrayed so much 
interest as would be involved in direct 
inquiry. She remembered how his face 
looked as it lit up suddenly with that eager 


In “ God’s Country ‘ 


129 


glow. How dare he look at her like that ? 
How soft his voice was, how full of tender 
concern, as he asked if she were fright- 
ened ! “ What impudence 1 ” And that 

mad dash over the cliff ! No other man 
she knew could or would have done it. It 
reminded her of that old legend of the 
knight, the lions, and the lady’s glove. It 
certainly was absurd. It was impertinent, 
if she chose to so consider it ; but it was 
deliciously reckless, and it was flattering to 
the point of intoxication. She had pro- 
ceeded to crush him instantly, as she 
always did when he presumed ; but in the 
present instance there was an annoying 
sense of incompleteness. She feared that 
this time she had not done it effectively. 
She flushed as she recalled that headlong 
rush they had taken down the bluff, and 

the sensation that accompanied it, deli- 
9 


130 


In “ GodU Country'^ 


cious and yet full of vague terror ; and a 
thrill that was like the echo of it passed 
over her. The odorous wind that came in 
from the garden bore to her fragments of a 
plaintive melody, and presently, for no rea- 
son that she could assign, her head 
drooped upon the high, old-fashioned sill 
of the window and she began to cry softly. 


VI. 

A NOTED Kentucky turfman who late in 
life sought refuge in the bosom of the 
Church was frequently heard to remark, 
with the moisture of deep feeling in his 
eyes, that he confidently expected to run 
his favorite thoroughbred in the green 
pastures of the hereafter. It is not improb- 
able that the indifference of his class to 
the consolations of religion and the prom- 
ises of a future life is due to the absence of 
the simple faith upon which the General’s 
blissful anticipation reposed. Were heav- 
en an interminable boulevard, and the 
transportation of horses assured, no Ken- 
tuckian would miss it, though convinced 
that it lay through a prohibition district. 


132 


In “ God^s Country. 


Other men own horses, drive them, admire 
their beauty, glory in their speed; but 
nowhere outside of an Arabian legend is a 
horse the object of so much affectionate 
solicitude, so nearly a part of its owner’s 
being, as in Kentucky. A Kentuckian 
may be conceived of without his title ; he 
may exist without an imposing pedigree ; a 
bold flight of the imagination may even 
picture him without his morning toddy ; — 
but without his horse he is impossible. 
The buggy is the vehicle with which he is 
inseparably identified. “ Buggy-riding ” is 
his chief amusement. The buggy is to him 
at the same time what the gondola is to the 
Venetian, and the guitar to the Spaniard — 
the chief means of locomotion and the 
prime promoter of his love affairs. It is 
the object about which all the tender and 
romantic associations of the country cling; 


133 


In “ God^s Coufitryl 


the supreme opportunity of lovers — the 
resort in which two souls, under fairly 
favorable conditions, are speedily reduced 
to the elementary substance of a single 
thought. Its advantages can only be fully 
appreciated by those who have enjoyed 
them ; but the security from intrusion, 
which is one of them, will be readily appre- 
ciated by the most obtuse. To the sense 
of possession induced by the nearness of 
the beloved object and the absence of 
other people is added that keen exhilara- 
tion that comes of rapid motion without 
effort, when one seems to cleave the air as 
with the wings of a bird. The lover who 
possesses a horse and buggy does not sigh 
for the wings of a dove, and the one who 
does not is practically out of the race if his 
rival is fully equipped. Whether he is 
speeding like a shaft along the smooth, 


34 


In “ God^s Coimtry. 


white turnpike in" the sunlit glory of a per- 
fect day, cutting the mellow radiance of a 
moonlit night, or loitering idly through 
some flowery lane in the warm, odorous 
twilight of a summer evening, employing 
the interval as fate or feeling may dictate, 
he is equally blessed. He has with him 
at the same moment the two things dearest 
on earth, without which heaven is void of 
attraction— his sweetheart and his horse. 

It was the first week in July, and the 
afternoon, though breezy, was hot. Lydia 
had an engagement to drive, or, as she 
would have phrased it, “ to ride,” with Bev- 
erly, who a few days before had matched 
the bay trotter that had been for some time 
his especial pride. The drive, which was a 
formal dedication of the new possession to 
the divinity he adored, was the last they 
would take together for a considerable 


In “ God's Country, 


135 


time, for, as Beverly frequently declared 
with an air of outraged proprietorship, he 
“ never got to look at Lyd after the guests 
arrived.” 

At the appointed hour he came spinning 
down the avenue, the flawless varnish of his 
buggy reflecting the sunlight from a mil- 
lion angles at once. Three negroes idling 
in the stable lot turned at the sound of 
wheels, and, recognizing Beverly, engaged 
in a frantic foot-race for the privilege of 
holding the horses, with an eye to the tip 
that would be forthcoming at the end of 
the vigil. Beverly, resplendent in a pair of 
white marseilles trousers that fitted like the 
fresco to a ceiling, a vest of the same mate- 
rial cut low enough to expose three dia-^ 
mond studs, a w'hite cravat, a dark cloth 
coat, and a soft felt hat of a light color, 
sprang out of the vehicle and walked into 


>36 


In “ God^s Country, 


the house with the manner of one quite at 
home. In the hall he met Meriky. 

“ Meriky, go see if yuh Miss Lyd’s 
ready,” he ordered, and than went out on 
the porch to wait. In a few minutes the 

Colonel came around the corner of the house, 

/ 

blowing from the fatigue of a short walk. 
He wore a suit of ecru linen minus the coat, 
freshly laundered and stiffly starched, and a 
broad-brimmed panama hat of the finest 
braid. As he edged into the shadow he 
took off his hat and mopped out the lining 
with a flowered silk handkerchief, which he 
returned to the bosom of his waistcoat. 

“ Hello, Bev.” 

“ Good evenin’, Kunnel.” 

“ Whew, but it’s hot ! ” exclaimed the 
Colonel, as he came up the steps. “Is 
that yuh new trotter ? ” he asked, as the 
two shook hands. 


In “ God’s Cou?itr}K 


137 


“Yes,” replied Beverly; “don’t you 
think it’s a splendid match ? ” 

“ Yes, it is. I can’t tell which is which 
from here. I’ll go an’ take a look at ’em 
d’rectly. My stars ! but I’m tired,” he 
groaned, as he sank into a chair. 

“ Where’ve you been > ” asked Bev. 

“ I’ve been to the creek pahsture to look 
at a filly that got hurt yesterday, an’ I’m 
about used up.” 

Outside a community laboring under the 
delusion that a man cannot move on less 
than four feet, it would have appeared that 
the Colonel’s weariness was absurdly out 
of proportion to his exertion ; but they 
were men of one mind, and Bev merely 
inquired whether there was anything the 
matter with the gray mare. 

Meriky now appeared with the message 
that Miss Liddy would be ready in a minute. 


138 


Jn “ God's Country." 


“ Have a julip while you are waitin/ 
Bev ? " asked Colonel. 

“ B’lieve I will, Kunnel.’^ 

Colonel Ransome walked to the end of 
the porch, near which a dark mass of rags 
and glistening black limbs w^as tumbling 
about on the grass. 

“ Mose ! Elic ! Gabe ! " he called, in 
quick succession. 

At the sound of his voice the shapeless 
mass was instantly resolved into three 
small negroes, who sprang up and came 
toward him with that cunning assumption 
of awe that is one of the many wiles of the 
race. 

“ Mose, you black vilyun, run to the 
branch an’ get some mint quick.” 

Mose started off at a tangent, his bare 
black legs revolving around his diminutive 
person like spokes around the hub of a wheel. 


In “ God's Country." 


39 


“ Gabe, you go tell Meriky to bring 
some cracked ice an’ some glasses.” 
Gabe flew in another direction. 

“ Elic, run that chicken out yuh Miss 
Lyddy’s flower-bed, an’ then go back to the 
cabin where you b’long. I’ll whale the 
life out o’ you black devils if you don’t 
keep off my grass.” 

Elic sped after the chicken unimpressed 
by a threat so remote, indeflnite, and alto- 
gether doubtful of fulfilment. 

“The varments are as thick on this 
place as toadstools after a rain,” said the 
Colonel, coming back to his chair. “ It’s 
worse ’n slave-time. I’ll swear I do’ know 
where they come from.” ^ 

“The worst of it is,” remarked Bev, 
“ they eat just as much as the grown ones, 
and they are no earthly account.” 

“ Well, I don’t begrudge any of ’em 


140 


In “ God's Country." 


what they can hold ; but it does rile me to 
see them that’s old enough eat my victuals 
all the year roun’ an’ then vote the Re- 
publican ticket every chance they get.” 

“ It ain’t what they eat as much as what 
they steal, that aggravates me. you 
want to eat spring chicken you’ve got to 
set under the hen-roost all night with a 
shot-gun ; an’ you just can’t keep a water- 
melon ; I’ve given that up. I’d rather 
buy what I want than bother with keepin’ 
the niggers out of the patch. As far as 
the votin’s concerned, I s’pose it is only 
natural they should vote with the party 
that freed ’em ; but it’s tough on us.” 

“What’s their freedom wuth to ’em?” 
queried the Colonel, explosively. “ They 
are a million times wuss off — a million 
times raggeder, dirtier, lazier than they’ve 
ever been since the first ship-load of the 


hi “ God's Country^ 




141 


damned war-breedin’ devils was landed at 
Jamestown. Freedom!” finished the Col- 
onel, in a burst of bitterness. 

“ I know,” replied Bev, soothingly, “ but 
they can’t see it that way. They can steal 
as much as they want now without gettin’ 
thrashed, an’ that’s wuth a good deal to 
’em. Their bein’ free wouldn’t make so 
much difference after all if we could only 
get rid of ’em an’ forget how it was done.” 

“ Don’t, Bev,” said the Colonel, redden- 
ing, “ don’t get me started on that to-day ; 
it’s too hot.” 

Here Meriky appeared with the waiter 
containing the ice and the glasses, and a 
moment later the penetrating odor of 
bri^sed mint heralded the / approach of 
Mose. The Colonel took at bunch of keys 
from his trousers pocket, and produced 
from the long, narrpw closet in the dining- 


142 


In “ God's Country. 


room a cut-glass decanter half full of an 
amber-brown liquid that ran like oil. Bev- 
erly was full of fresh turf gossip, which he 
reeled off gayly for the Colonel’s entertain- 
ment as they sipped their julep. 

When the elastic feminine minute had 
stretched to half an hour, Lydia appeared 
on the porch in a dress of white muslin, 
soft and voluminous of drapery, with a 
superabundance of sash that, aS she 
moved, rose and floated behind her like a 
cloud. The leghorn hat with brim fantas- 
tically bent, framed her face picturesquely. 
The crown of it was lost in vaporous 
wreaths of tulle, and over the brim fell a 
streamer of the same material that encir- 
cled her pearly throat and dropped forward 
over the cluster of Jacqueminot roses that 
burned against her breast, veiling them 
daintily as with a mist of dew. With her 


In “ God*s Country. 


143 


complexion, without the roses the toilet 
would have been cold and meaningless; 
with that dash of color, softened by the 
film of tulle, it was radiant and warm with 
life. That last touch embodied the poetic 
inspiration of an acutely feminine tempera- 
ment that marks the distinction between 
mere clothes and a sentiment expressed in 
fabrics. 

The effect upon Bev was simply stun- 
ning. It seemed that a cool, fleecy cloud 
had floated down to his feet from some 
region of perpetual snow — a cloud pene- 
trated by one palpitating, rosy gleam, from 
the midst of which looked out at him the 
fairest, freshest, brightest face he had ever 
seen. (l^ere was more intoxication in one 
glance of her gold-brown eyes than was 
imprisoned in an entire bonded warehouse. 
The impulse to gather her into a quick, 


144 


In “ God's Country . 


crushing hug was so sudden and so over- 
powering that it was barely quelled by the 
presence of the Colonel. It subsided ulti- 
mately into a consuming desire to melt 
into a tulle streamer. 

“ Have some, Lyd ? " asked her father, 
referring to the contents of the decanter. 

“ It’s mos’ too hot for julip,” replied 
Lydia, “but you may gi’ me a little with 
lots o’ ice an’ plenty o’ sugah.” 

Beverly set down his own glass and pro- 
ceeded to mix the tipple according to direc- 
tions. 

When the glasses were emptied, all three 
sauntered down to the gate, where Bev’s 
purchase was minutely examined and ex- 
haustively discussed in the technical lan- 
guage of the turf. Then Bev assisted 
Lydia into the shining vehicle, mounted 
after her, and took up the reins with that 


In “ God's Country^ 


145 


rapturous enthusiasm a Kentuckian only 
feels behind a pair of flyers he believes 
can beat anything on the road. The 
horses, satin-coated, clean-limbed, bright- 
eyed, groomed to the most exquisite polish, 
and proudly conscious of their owner’s 
pride in them, stepped out daintily, dis- 
daining the earth, curveting coquettishly 
until the firm hand on the rein brought 
them down to a steady, even trot that 
quickened until team, vehicle, the two fig- 
ures, the dangling legs of the small darky 
that had caught on behind to open the gate 
melted into a single winged thing that 
seemed to skim the elastic turf of the ave- 
nue with the speed of a swallow. The top 
was down, and as the buggy rolled out into 
the road its course was marked by Lydia’s 
red parasol waving aloft like a gigantic 

poppy. 

10 


146 


In *• God's Country 


“ Bev will split the pike wide open this 
evenin’,” remarked the Colonel, with a 
sympathetic gaze after the vanishing equip- 
age. 

Bev settled his hat on his head and with 
the merest tap of the whip urged the 
horses to their best, and for five minutes 
sat behind them in a speechless ecstasy of 
realization. Then he turned and looked 
at Lyd. She was watching the horses with 
a delight as keen as his own, her face lit 
with the fine glow of exhilaration induced 
by the fresh air and rapid motion. He 
slackened speed, and for a moment seemed 
to drink her with his eyes, then, darting a 
quick look fore and aft, seized the handle 
of the red parasol and executed an adroit 
manoeuvre. 

“ Ah ! ” he exclaimed, with a long exha- 
lation. 


147 


In “ God's Country." 


“Ain’t you ashamed o’ yourself, Bev, 
right here on the pike ? ” demanded Miss 
Ransome, with a creditable show of disap- 
proval, instinctively repeating the look fore 
and aft with which Bev had preluded his 
coup. 

A laugh — a deep gurgle of intense satis- 
faction — was the only reply to the rebuke. 

“ I couldn’t help it, Lyd,” he said, pres- 
ently, with a weak attempt to appear sub- 
dued; “it’s such a lingering eternity till 
October. Does it seem long to you, Lyd ? 
Say yes,” he urged, with a spasmodic pres- 
sure of the hand that lay in her lap and a 
futile attempt to circumvent the hat brim. 

“ On the contrary, it seems very short,” 
replied Lydia ; “ and there is such a lot to 
do.” 

“ Why should there be such a lot to do ? 
I never could see the use ‘of a woman’s 


148 


In “ God's Country." 


buying out creation, and making it up into 
frillfralls before she is married, just as if 
she never expected to get anything after- 
wards.” 

“ Perhaps,” replied Miss Ransome, 
loftily, “ it’s because the men make such a 
fuss about the bills when they do come in. 
There’s a tradition to the effec’ that you 
can’t tell anything about what a man’s 
goin’ to do aftah marriage by the way he 
has behaved befoah.” 

That’s a base libel on the sex, Lyd, an’ 
you know it,” returned Bev, with imper- 
turbable complaisance. “ You know,” he 
went on, “ there is always a great deal of 
unnecessary parade about a weddin’. Of 
course the fuss an’ flowers an’ the frills are 
all right for a woman ; she looks perfectly 
natural in the midst of ’em, an’ she enjoys 
it : but it bores a man to death, an’ he 


In “ God's Country." 


149 


looks so egregiously idiotic an’ out of 
place. I nevah see a po’ devil goin’ 
through the martyrdom of a big weddin’ 
that I don’t feel like heatin’ up a mob an’ 
goin’ to the rescue. An’ I b’lieve all men 
feel about it just as I do.” 

“ I s’pose they do,” returned Lydia. 
“ A man is so use’ to bein’ first in every- 
thing, he natchally dislikes a situation in 
which he is not the mos’ conspicyus fig- 
yah.” 

“There is only one woman in the world 
who could inveigle me into goin’ through 
with it,” remarked Bev, impressively, with 
another feint at the parasol handle, which 
was deftly eluded by Lydia. 


VII. 


Other eyes than those of the Colonel 
watched Beverly's buggy sweeping along 
the avenue, but with an expression the 
reverse of sympathetic. They were the 
eyes of Karl, who happened at the time to 
be crossing the lawn. He leaned upon the 
handle of his rake and looked after it until 
it turned into the road, and a moment later 
he saw the Colonel mount his horse and 
ride away. 

He had known from the first that Lydia 
was a forbidden joy to him, but the sense 
of her remoteness never oppressed him as 
it did now. He had watched her saunter- 
ing toward the gate, and thought he had 
never seen her look so beautiful. The 

150 


In “ God's Country." 


151 


spectacle stirred him like the swell of a 
majestic cadence, ^^is heart was full of 
bitterness, and the emotion hitherto fairly- 
controlled rose and swept over him in a 
tempest of wrathful, unreasoning jealous^ 
He hated the arrogant young fellow who, 
from the height of undisputed possession, 
looked down upon him in contemptuous 
security. As he turned back toward the 
garden he remembered that the house was 
empty. Lydia and her father would not 
return until late; the negro women, the 
only persons who had any business at the 
house, were at the 'cabin, most probably 
asleep. He went to one of the parlor win- 
dows that looked upon the garden, and 
after one or two attempts succeeded in pry- 
ing open the shutter. He put his head 
into the room and listened. The house 
was as silent as a tomb. He climbed in 


152 


In “ God's Country! 


and sat down at the piano. How long it 
had been since he had touched one ! His 
fingers, stiffened by manual labor, were at 
first refractory, and the things he had 
known came to him only in fragments. A 
few massive chords from the “ Pilgrims’ 
Chorus,” the ethereal song of the Rhine 
daughters, a few measures of a nocturne, a 
fragment of the Sonata Pathetique. He 
wandered aimlessly from theme to theme, 
from opera to opera. The things he most 
loved came back to him gradually, and he 
played on, taking no note of time. He 
forgot his uncouth attire, his aristocratic 
rival ; forgot even the despair that had sent 
him to the piano for consolation; forgot 
everything but the heart within him throb- 
bing with tumultuous passion, and the 
instrument through which it found expres- 
sion. It spoke for him in divine melody. 


In “ God's Coimtry." 


153 


in tempestuous chords, as no feeble ver- 
biage could speak; and as the afternoon 
wore on he sat there with flushed face and 
humid eyes, pouring his soul out in the old- 
fashioned parlor with its lofty ceiling, dim 
and cool as a cloister. 

The buggy came back along the avenue 
in the fragrant twilight of the summer eve- 
ning and deposited a portion of its burden 
at Colonel Ransome’s gate. 

“ Won’t you come in, Bev, and have sup- 
per?” Lydia asked, as he handed her 
down. 

“No, thank you, Lyd, not to-night. I 
brought Claude Graves out from town with 
me, an’ I mus’ go back and keep him com- 
pany.” 

He broke a rose from the cluster she 
wore and stuck it in his button-hole before 
climbing back to his seat. Lydia stood 


154 “ God^s Coimtry'^ 


looking after him a moment as the buggy 
rolled away. 

“ Bev looked perfec’ly stunnin’ this even- 
in’,’’ she said. The thought in her mind 
was that he had not been particularly 
entertaining, and that in spite of the excite- 
ment of the new horse the drive had been 
tiresome. She was in a mood to resent 
the air of proprietorship Bev had recently 
begun to assume. iHe was entirely too 
confident ; it was almost as if she were 
married. As she walked slowly toward the 
house she wished there had never been a 
mortgage, or at least that Bev had not 
come between her father and bankruptcy. 
If anything should happen that she did not 
marry him the obligation would be awk- 
ward. There was nothing to happen, of 
course. She had always intended marry- 
ing him ; she would have married him if 


I7i “ God's Count jy. 


155 


there had been no mortgage ; but for the 
last few days her father’s obligation to Bev 
had haunted, harassed her, and this was 
the more singular, since up to that time it 
had not disturbed her any more than if she 
had been unaware of its existence. She 
was weighed down by a mental depression 
wholly unaccounted for. It was the first 
pull on the tether that until now she had 
not felt. When she gobinto the house she 
thought she heard the piano. She went to 
the parlor door and looked in. Seated at 
the instrument was Karl, oblivious of 
everything but the sounds he conjured 
from it. The window through which he 
had entered was still open, and the light of 
the moon just rising streamed over him. 
She had always been keenly alive to the 
refined beauty of his face, but she had 
never seen it as she saw it now. He was 


In “ God^s Country! 


156 


playing Chopin’s nocturne in G major. 
She did not know what it was, but the 
beautiful rippling effect of the successive 
thirds and sixths with which it opens 
reminded her one moment of the splash 
and flow of water, the next, as it sank to 
the faintest pianissimo, of the leaves gos- 
siping in soft whispers overhead. Then 
came the exquisite melody of the second 
movement, with the long note in the bass 
that was like the dip of an oar. Piano 
first, then forte, dying away again to an 
echo, as if a boatman had passed singing 
in the moonlight, and the leaves murmured, 
and the stream rippled on. Karl’s back 
was toward the door, and he had not seen 
her enter. She approached softly and 
sank into an arm-chair near the piano. 
He paused only for a moment. This time 
it was the funeral march from the first 


In “ God's Country'' 


157 


sonata. The heavy alternating chords in 
the bass were like the rhythmic tramp of 
armed men. The opening measure was a 
knell, and then the funeral chant, heavy 
with anguish, rose like the wail of a nation 
mourning its last hope. The sobbing 
chords of the minor harmony freighted 
with the tragedy, the heartbreak of a thou- 
sand defeats, wrung her, weighed her down 
as with the agony of a personal grief. 
Then out of the tumult and anguish of the 
chant the heavenly melody of the trio 
soared like the prayer of faith. It was her 
misfortune at that moment that she pos- 
sessed the rare faculty of instantly recog- 
nizing beauty, whether expressed in form 
or sound. For an ear naturally acute, the 
sublime harmonies of Chopin needed no 
interpreter; to a temperament peculiarly 
susceptible, that majestic ei3ic of deso- 


In “ God's Country. 


158 


lation was a new language. She had 
learned music as other girls she knew had 
learned it, after the manner of boarding- 
schools, and her knowledge was confined 
to the flashy and frivolous dances, the sen- 
timental themes with variations on a level 
with the understanding of those who regard 
it as an accomplishment and nothing more. 
She had never dreamed that it was a lan- 
guage capable of conveying the most vivid 
impressions, of embodying the whole range 
of emotion from the delicate, ethereal ten- 
derness of a dream of love, to the despair- 
ing wail of a nation borne down by the 
anguish of ultimate defeat. She could not 
analyze the impressions she received, she 
could only feel with the intensity of a finely 
sensitive organism. She ached as with the 
pang of unutterable grief. The trio died 
away and the wail rose again. Her head 


In “ God's Country. 


159 


drooped against the back of the chair, and 
the tears fell rapidly on the hands folded 
in her lap. When the last heavy note of 
agony died away, she felt that she could 
not have endured another measure. Karl 
sat for a moment irresolute, then his fingers 
again sought the keys, running over them 
in rippling arpeggios, and then he began to 
sing, to a subdued accompaniment, Rubin- 
stein’s air to Heine’s lyric, “Thou art so 
like a flower.” He sang in German, and 
she could not understand it, but she knew 
he was singing of her, and the last strain 
of the song was like a benediction. When 
he had finished he turned slowly round 
upon the stool and saw the white gar- 
mented figure in the chair, just beyond the 
oblique square of moonlight that lay upon 
the floor. 

Was it an apparition conjured by his 


i6o 


In “ God's Country! 


own intense desire ? He sprang toward it 
with a quick, joyful cry. It was no shad- 
ow. The hand within his own was warm, 
and its pulse quickened at his touch ; the 
eyes returned his gaze with a fixed inten- 
sity. As Karl knelt beside her chair, his 
figure was obscure in the gloom of the 
room. Lydia saw only his face, as he 
leaned into the moonlight, approaching 
her slowly but steadily. She knew it was 
the gardener who knelt there ; she was 
acutely sensible of the guilt and humilia- 
tion of the moment, but she could not stir. 
She was seized with a sudden terror as of 
a force imminent, unmeasured, as the face 
drew slowly nearer, the eyes burning with 
a soul-compelling passion whose prayer 
was destiny. It seemed strange to her 
that will as well as strength had failed. 
It was her wonder and her humiliation that 


In “ God's Country." 


i6i 


there was not even a desire to escape. It 
was like a dream in which life seems to 
hang upon flight, and flight is impossible. 
The face came nearer. She knew what 
would happen; she felt the disgrace of it ; 
she was curiously occupied with the sudden 
failure of volition, and the equally sudden 
birth of that mysterious impulse within her 
which, in spite of her terror at what it 
involved, yearned toward him with strange, 
impatient expectancy. At last she felt his 
breath upon her hair, his lips upon her 
own. The room reeled, and chaos was 
come. With an eager, impetuous move- 
ment Karl gathered her in his arms, 
buried his face in the soft folds of illusion 
and the cool fragrance of the roses on her 
breast, and for one delicious moment 
exulted, revelled like a bee at the heart of 
a flower. It was but an instant. There 


i 62 


In God's Country! 


was a step in the hall, and with another 
hurried pressure of the lips, Karl vanished 
through the open window, crushing a rose 
in his hand. 

The step was Mericky’s. She was com- 
ing to tell Lydia that her father had 
returned and supper was ready. Lydia 
paid no attention to the summons. When 
the girl had gone, she rose with the semi- 
consciousness of one hypnotized, and went 
up-stairs. She locked the door, threw her 
hat on the bed, and sat down in the rocker 
by the window. 

“ Ich sterbe fiir dich,” he had said, as his 
head sank on her breast ; and the impas- 
sioned energy of the utterance was an ade- 
quate translation of the sentiment. 

What was the breezy confidence of Lev’s 
wooing to that heart-wringing supplication ? 
^ There was ho light in the room, but by 


In “ God's Country' 


163 


her chair there lay an oblique square of 
moonlight like the one that fell at her feet 
in the parlor. She fancied she could 
almost see the kneeling figure of Karl lean- 
ing toward her. She closed her eyes and 
saw again the glowing face approaching 
her through the dusk ; felt the breath upon 
her hair, the touch upon her lips ; and at 
the thought, as at the touch, a wave of 
exquisite emotion swept over her, a surg- 
ing fire filled her veins. When she opened 
her eyes the image vanished, the sensation 
was dissipated. Again and again she 
retraced each moment of the time from her 
entrance to the disappearance of Karl; — 
how he looked when she went in, sitting 
there with the moonlight streaming over 
his face, that shone with a new and start- 
ling radiance ; the soft murmur of the 
^locturne, the fainting diminuendo of the 


164 


Iti “ God^s Cou?ttry; 


gondolied, the sobbing harmony of the 
dirge, the ethereal strains of the trio, that 
melodious benediction that was like the 
“ Peace be with you ” of an angel ; the 
kneeling figure, the eyes burning through 
the dusk, the face coming nearer, the 
strange quiescence that held her, and then 
that tumultuous crescendo of emotion that 
was at once an awakening and a revela- 
tion. Again and again she realized it in 
all its original vividness and intensity. 
That mysterious force with which his touch 
had charged her swept up in successive 
waves of new, delicious life ; she swam in a 
sea of delight, across which the sublime 
strains of the march, the soothing ripple of 
the nocturne, floated like the echo of an 
echo as she lived again the delirious 
ecstasy of supreme surrender. By-and*by 
the sensation became less and less vivid 


Ill “ God’s Country,” 




with each return, until it eluded her alto- 
gether, and the fevered mood was suc- 
ceeded by a cold stupor. 

The moon that was just above the tree- 
tops when she went up-stairs, swept over 
and dipped to westward. The dense 
shadow that lay upon the garden retreated 
before it, and in the windless night each 
shrub and leaf was sharply etched upon 
the white wall of the house. The moon 
went down ; the breeze blew fresh in the 
starry dusk between night and day; dusk 
paled to dawn ; the east caught fire, and 
its glow suffused the room and its listless 
occupant. A blue spiral of smoke rose 
from the chimney at the end of the L, and 
from the same quarter came the regular, 
ponderous stroke of the rolling-pin with 
which Cynthy was beating the biscuit for 
breakfast. Between the strokes the 


In “ God's Country," 


1 66 


strains of a hymn rose with all the paucity 
of sentiment and monotony of melody that 
distinguish the negro song. A procession 
of negroes passed under the window, sing- 
ing on their way to the field ; then Meriky 
came to call Lydia. She got up now to 
change her dress for something more suit- 
able for an appearance at breakfast. The 
sun was high ; her father, impatient for his 
morning meal, walked up and down the 
porch, whistling “The Bonny Blue Flag,” 
and Karl was hoeing in the garden. It 
seemed to her that the entire solar system 
had been on a stupendous drunk the night 
before, reeling through space at a reckless 
rate. It was strange to see it moving on 
in the same old way this morning ; strang- 
est of all to see Karl hoeing placidly, as if 
the shell of a new world had not cracked 
twelve hours before. 


VIII. 


The day was full of bustle and prepara- 
tion. The friends who for the last two 
months had visited them in occasional 
showers were to settle the next week in a 
steady inundation. Some of them were to 
arrive the following day ; and Lydia, while 
occupied with preparations for their recep- 
tion, was intently engaged on the problem 
which Karl’s recent audacity had presented 
for solution. What to do with him after 
that, was the question. She felt that the 
only safe thing to do was to send him 
away immediately. But here a difficulty 
arose : she had so often praised his effi- 
ciency and his willingness to her father 

that, if she attempted to urge his dismissal, 
167 


If I “ Gods Country! 


1 68 


some very excellent reason must be forth- 
coming, and there was none at hand. The 
real one was not to be dreamed of for a 
moment as the one to be advanced ; and 
though the day was spent in painful stress 
of thought, night left her where the morn- 
ing had found her — wholly at sea. In the 
midst of her confusion and distress she 
was secretly pleased that she had failed 
to find a plausible reason for recommend- 
ing his discharge. She did not see Karl 
that day. She allowed him to cut the 
flowers to fill the vases, a thing he had 
never done before, and she did not go near 
the garden. 

The summer to which she had looked 
forward with such keen zest palled upon 
her suddenly. She wished wearily that 
there were some means of escape from the 
duties and responsibilities that had 


In “ God's Country." 


169 


hitherto been a pleasure to her. The next 
moment she looked forward eagerly to the 
arrival of the guests as to something that 
was to relieve her from herself, and dis- 
tract her from that harrowing self-examina- 
tion. She could come to no decision in 
regard to Karl, and she finally turned away 
from the subject from sheer weariness. 
The advance party of guests arrived and 
took possession of the Colonel’s premises. 
The dim upper chambers, so long empty, 
rang with gay gossip and idle mirth. In a 
week the house was full, and when these 
were gone there were others to come. 
The day was full of rides and drives, of 
savory feasts and odorous juleps, of excur- 
sions to the river, of visits in the neighbor- 
hood, of croquet and luscious luncheons of 
water-melon eaten on the grass under the 
trees; of love-making, of idle gallantry, of 


1 70 “ God^s Coimtry'^ 


turf gossip and poker; of juicy jest and 
spicy story that flowed with the after-din- 
ner wine ; of girls, youthful, sparkling with 
animation, blooming in the thinnest, most 
ethereal, and gayest of gay toilets ; and of 
men, young, middle-aged, or elderly, who 
were chiefly engaged in making life inter- 
esting to them. At night there was dan- 
cing in the parlor, that looked as if it might 
have been built for the ball-room of a sum- 
mer resort ; moonlight drives, more water- 
melons, more juleps, and more poker. 
Dave with his fiddle, and Tom with a 
banjo that bore but slight resemblance to 
the dapper instrument that has been 
adopted by polite society, furnished music 
for the dance. The banjo was made of 
the rim of a discarded sifter, fitted with a 
rude neck guiltless of frets, and usually 
strung with horse-hair, but Tom succeeded 


In '•'■■God's Country'' 


171 


in getting a marvellous amount of sound 
out of it that was not unmusical. Late into 
the night the smallest of feet in the most 
absurdly high heels and the most acutely 
pointed of toes pattered to the strains of 
“ Captain Jinks ” or “ Dixie,” none the 
less inspiring as a dance tune because it 
had borne so many brave men to their 
death. 

For the round-dances the girls took turns 
at the piano, and the rollicking measures of 
the quadrille were superseded by the “ Blue 
Danube,” “ Lauderbach,” and “Cham- 
pagne Charley.” This was a trifle labori- 
ous, besides depriving the girl who played 
of the pleasure of dancing. It occurred to 
Lydia one evening to ask Karl to play for 
them. He replied with a disdainful wave 
of his hand toward the parlor : 

“ For you I vill do anyding, for dem I 


172 


In “ God's Country." 


vill do Dotting ; ” and the girls continued 
to take turns. 

The older men and those who did not 
dance found amusement equally to their 
taste. The wide hall, open at both ends to 
the breeze, was filled with tables, about 
which they gathered ; and here the unfail- 
ing stream of turf talk flowed on, inter- 
rupted only by the clink of crushed ice and 
the rattle of poker chips. The wind, 
sweeping over the dewy flower-beds, came 
in moist and fragrant, mingling the delight- 
ful odors of the garden with the scent of 
mint. Round every hammock and rustic 
seat on the lawn floated a pale mist of mus- 
lin, and near it hovered the dark silhouette, 
whose proximity added the touch of senti- 
ment that completed the picture. Out in 
the starlit dusk of the garden or in the 
dim shadows of the porch above stood 


In “ God's Country." 


73 


Karl, watching the crowd through the open 
window, chafing at the spectacle of Lydia 
floating, unmindful of him and his aching 
heart, through the mazy revel of the qua- 
drille or the whirling eddies of the waltz. 

In August came the World’s Fair, which 
nobody thought of missing. Not a fair, 
strictly speaking, but a horse show, at 
which some of the finest blooded stock in 
the State was exhibited. The World’s 
Fair, with its incomparable burgoo, the 
lavish abundance of its dinners eaten un- 
der the trees, where the Kentuckian met 
everybody he had ever known, and the 
stranger was told he could feast his eyes on 
the daintiest specimens of horse-flesh and 
the loveliest gathering of women he was 
ever likely to encounter ; where one could 
sample the native beverage in its purity, 
and dine off a saddle of mutton that would 


174 


In “ God's Country," 


haunt him ever after as one of the tender- 
est memories of his life. 

The season waxed and waned. From 
July until the middle of October — for the 
country was more delightful in autumn 
than in summer — the gay, convivial life 
flowed on. For the first time since she 
had entered upon it, Lydia was not ab- 
sorbed by it. Instead of bearing her with 
it as before, it seemed to float by her like 
a panorama. She was living two lives — the 
one open, gay, imperious, full of the hom- 
age of an admiring throng, and the small 
concerns of every-day life ; the other se- 
cret, deep, intense, jealously guarded from 
the world about her and from the too strict 
scrutiny of her own conscience. Once, 
when tired and heated by the dance, she 
had gone to the parlor window that opened 
on the garden and seen a pallid, wistful 


In God's Country.” 


175 


face looking at her from the gloom, and 
always after that she felt it to be there, 
whether she saw it or not. Drawn by an 
irresistible fascination, she would leave the 
dance and scan the shadowy recesses of 
the garden for the face whose settled sad- 
ness filled her with a strange tumult, an 
agony of self-reproach. Alone in her 
room, when the sound of the fiddle and the 
rattle of chips had ceased, in the moonlit 
silence of that retreat, full of the odorous 
breath of the garden, she hugged the se- 
cret that was her supremest joy and bitter- 
est humiliation. Her father’s obligation to 
Bev was the cable of unyielding fibre that 
held her to her promise ; but had there 
been no obligation and no promise, Karl 
were equally remote. She could not sur- 
render herself to a man whom the world, 
her world, held in contempt. She could 


176 


In “ God'^s Country^ 


not bear the thought of being handed down 
in the tradition of the neighborhood as 
that handsome girl of Ransome’s who mar- 
ried a Dutch gardener. No one else would 
ever see in him what she had seen. To 
all the world he was a Dutch gardener, 
and nothing more ; and the world would 
remember him always as her father’s ser- 
vant. And she — she could never forget 
that on one occasion but for her interfer- 
ence he would have blacked her father’s 
shoes. But she loved him ; and all the 
arbitrary distinctions, the petty conven- 
tions, in Christendom could not abate one 
pang of the fierce, impatient yearning with 
which her heart went out to him in the 
deep silence of the night. He suffered 
without the dismal consolation of knowing 
that she suffered with him. This was the 
bitterest pang of all — that, out of the over- 


In “ God’s Country. 


177 


flowing abundance of her heart, she dare 
not throw him a drop of comfort. To a 
woman as finely organized as she, and 
trained, as she had been, to the strictest 
code in matters of the heart, her false at- 
titude towards Bev was a constant pain. 
How Bev would scorn her if he knew the 
truth ! A cold shudder passed over her at 
the thought of her father. The agony of 
the knowledge that she was at heart a 
traitor to her father, to his honor, to his 
rigid ideas of class, to everything she had 
been taught to reverence, was unbearable. 
She loved her father with a love highly sea- 
soned with admiration and with just that 
touch of awe that made it ideally filial; 
and the possibility of his ever looking upon 
her with other emotions than those of love 
and pride pierced her with unutterable 
anguish. She had hoped she would be so 


178 


In “ God's Country: 


much occupied with her guests that she 
would have no time to think ; but the cur- 
rent of her thought set so strongly inward 
that the festivities which absorbed them 
were but a passing interruption to her. 
She could not conquer the feeling through 
which she suffered, but she could drape the 
ignoble yearning in the dignity of supreme 
renunciation ; and she did that. She 
treated Karl with a lofty disdain, whose 
edge pierced them both at the same 
instant. During the day she revenged her 
own sufferings and humiliation upon him 
without mercy, in the manifold exquisite 
cruelties that only a woman and a refined 
nature can devise, and at night wept over 
him in passionate abandonment of remorse. 
She remembered with a thrill the splendid 
audacity of that “Ich sterbe fiir dich,” the 
pathos of that Liebchen.” She heard it 


In “ God's Country! 


179 


yet, heard it always ; through the breezy 
chatter of the crowd, and in the stillness of 
the night when they slept ; and meanwhile 
the waning summer was bearing her on 
into the blazing heart of autumn, toward 
the marriage she knew to be as unfair to 
Bev as it was distasteful to herself. 

They were gone at last. The great 
house was empty again. Lydia was be- 
coming accustomed to the dull pain that 
gnawed her, and there was not so much 
time to think of it, for the wedding was at 
hand, and in the rush of preparation every- 
thing else was obscured. The landscape 
had put on its autumn tints, the seed-pods 
in the garden were dry, and only a few late 
flowers lingered. Lydia had been very 
busy all day ; she was tired and depressed, 
and, glad to escape for a moment from the 
innumerable questions of the servants, who 


i8o 


In “ God's Country J 


never seemed to know what to do with 
anything, came out on the east porch and 
sat down in the ample rocker that stood 
invitingly near. The air was still balmy, 
and it came to her laden with the odor of 
fennel and ambrosia. Karl, who had been 
putting some flowers away in the pit, fin- 
ished his work as the sun went down, and, 
after putting on his coat, came toward the 
the house. Lydia thought wearily that he 
was coming to ask what she wanted done 
the next day; and she was so tired of 
being asked what she wanted done. He 
came close up to the porch, but did not 
come in. 

“I am going avay in de morning,” he 
said. “ May I say good-bye to you ? ” 

When he looked at her her face was so 
blank that he thought she had not heard 
him. 


In “ God V Country: 


i8i 


“ Where are you goin’ ?” she asked pres- 
ently. 

“ Back to my gountry — to Germany.’’ 

Certainly ! why should he not go ? The 
summer was over; they did not need a 
gardener any longer ; she would never 
need him again. She saw that the depart- 
ure was opportune, but she was stunned; 
for a moment she felt as if she had been 
struck on the head. 

“Will you do me de honor to shake 
hands mit me ? ” he asked, with that 
appealing glance that never failed to melt 
her, though she might give no sign. 

“ When are you goin’ ? ” she asked, as 
she held out her hand. 

“ In de morning before you vill be up. 
Dat is vy I gome to say good bye to-night.” 
He held the hand while he answered her, 
then pressed his lips to it. “I wish you 


i 82 


In God's Country: 


may be happy,” he said, at last, and his 
voice faltered a little on the last word. 
Then he put on his hat and went out at the 
gate. 

After all that she had made him suffer 
through that miserable summer, he wished 
she might be happy, and he was gone. 
She had seen his face for the last time. 
Somehow, in the multitudinous chances 
she had considered in relation to him, his 
going away, the most probable of all, she 
had not thought of. It seemed now as if 
it could not be. What would life be like 
when she did not see him every day ? The 
sad face, the faltering voice, wrung her 
heart ; and the agony must find relief. 
She fled up-stairs to the room that had 
been the scene of so many bitter conflicts, 
locked the door, and, throwing herself face 
downward on the bed, let the storm sweep 


I7i “ God^s Country, 


183 


over her. She did not go down to supper, 
but lay on the bed ; and the tempest raged 
and swelled until it seemed that life itself 
would be extinguished in the stress. 

It spent itself at last, and through the 
calm that followed there shone a gleam of 
triumph. The fight was over and she had 
won it. She looked back on that long, 
bitter summer with a sudden sense of awe, 
realizing for the first time how great the 
peril had been. She had not known how 
much she loved him till this moment ; but 
he was going away in the morning — the 
last fiery ordeal was past. Next week she 
would be married, and her path hereafter, 
if not flowery, would at least be smooth. 
None but herself would ever know of her 
infidelity to Bev, and she would atone for 
it by every tender ministration that a 
secret penitence could suggest. As she 


184 


In “ God's Country." 


lay there she thought of the serenade Karl 
had sung the first time she saw him. She 
had so wanted to hear it again, but she 
could never bring herself to ask him to sing 
it. She felt as if she could ask him now. 
Why should she not ? She was stronger 
now, strong with the assurance of victory, 
and it could make no difference except to 
soften the thorny memories of the darkest 
period of her life. A delicious glow 
passed over her at the thought of seeing 
him again. There were only three persons- 
in the house — herself, her father, and Karl. 
Her father slept down-stairs in the front of 
the house ; Karl was away at the end of 
the L ; no one but her could hear him, and 
nobody would ever know. Why should 
she not have this small pleasure to temper 
the memories of that bitter summer ? And 
might she not, now that all was over, say 


Iti “ God's Country' 


•8s 


something kindly that would mitigate the 
equally dismal remembrance that Karl 
must carry away ? With the energy of sud- 
den resolve, she rose. In going to the 
gardener’s room she experienced no sense 
of impropriety or confusion : she did not 
know how long she had been lying there, 
did not have the least idea of the time of 
night ; but a faint glow from the window 
at the end of the porch showed her that 
Karl’s lamp was still burning and that he 
had not gone to bed. 

Her hair had come down and was tum- 
bling about her neck ; she whipped it out 
and caught it back with a hairpin, took up 
the guitar, and skirted the shadowy porch 
to the room over the kitchen. The win- 
dow was open and she could see Karl sit- 
ting in the middle of the room with his 
head bowed upon his hands. She tapped 


i86 


In “ God^s CounUy' 


lightly on the pane. He looked up and 
saw her standing in the dim light with the 
guitar in her hand. 

“ Karl,” she said, “ I want you to sing 
me that song before you go — the one you 
sung me that day for your dinner.” 

He came forward and took the instru- 
ment. He saw she had been crying, but 
the experience of the summer had been so 
crushing, he was so subdued by her past 
behavior, that he did not dream the tears 
were for him. 

“ You are grieved for someding,” he 
said, with touching sympathy. 

He opened the door and gave her a 
chair, and, sitting near her on the sill of 
the window, began to sing the song with all 
the tenderness and pathos his own yearn- 
ing and bitter disappointment could put 
into it. It brought back all the old tumult. 


In '‘'‘God's Country." 


187 


She saw now, when it was too late, 
that she had overestimated her strength. 
When he finished, she was sobbing ; and 
in an instant he was kneeling by her chair, 
raising to her a face sad, searching, but 
shining with the tremulous glow of a hope 
just born. 

“ You weep. Liebchen, is it for me ? " 

She did not answer, but laid a hand 
gently on his head and looked at him, 
with all the pent yearning of her full heart, 
all the agony of that long, weary struggle, 
and all the pathos of defeat in her eyes. 
It was no use. At that moment it seemed 
that there was nothing else in the world 
but him. Everything else was remote, 
dim, and unreal. 

He clasped her with a fierce, exultant 
joy. 

“You love me in spite of dis.?” he 


i88 


In “ God's Country^ 


asked, looking down at his coarse attire. 
“ You love me in spite of dat I am your 
nigga?” 

“ In spite of all,” she faltered. 

It was out at last : the crest of victory 
sank in inglorious surrender. Her humili- 
ation was his triumph. 

He looked at her with a face radiant, 
shining with a beauty not of earth. 

“ Liebchen,” he whispered, “ it is 
divine.” 

“You vill gome mit me to mein goun- 
try ? ” he asked presently. 

She laid a finger on his lip. “ Don’t,” 
she said ; “ I can’t bear it.” 

“ I vill not be a vagabond in mein own 
gountry ; we vill be very happy. Gome 
mit me, Liebchen.” 

He would not be a vagabond in his own 
country. The information that would 


In “ God's Country." 


189 


have been worth much to her once was 
worth nothing now. She scarcely heard 
it. 

“ I can’t do that,” she said. “ You 
must go, and I must stay here and do as I 
have promised ; but I wanted to tell you 
that I know I have been very cruel, and 
that I am very sorry. It was hard for me, 
too, and I could not trust myself to be 
kind.” 


IX. 


It seemed but a moment she had been 
sitting there with his arms around her and 
his head upon her breast, but the east was 
red and the sun was almost up. Lydia 
rose wearily. The sense of defeat, that 
was more fatiguing than the struggle, 
clung to her. “ It’s time you were gone,” 
she said. He took her hands in his and 
asked, with searching earnestness, 

“ If you love me, vy vill you not gome 
mit me ? ” 

“ I can’t,” she answered, too tired for 
explanation. 

“ Is it your fader ? ” he asked. 

She nodded, and said good-bye, looking 

up at him with a tender glow on her face. 

190 


In “ God^s Country! 


191 


The hair streaming about her shoulders 
had caught the flame of sunrise like a 
torch. He stooped and touched it with his 
lips as reverently as he would have kissed 
the garment of a saint. As Lydia turned 
from the door her eye encountered the 
figure of Beverly Johnson standing in the 
garden below. 

Beverly had driven to town with the 
Colonel the day before ; it was eleven 
o’clock at night when they returned, and 
rather than go on to his own place, which 
was several miles down the road, he had 
stayed all night, as he frequently did on 
such occasions. It happened this morning 
that there was some urgent reason for his 
being at home early, and he did not wait 
for the Colonel’s late breakfast, but came 
down as soon as it was light and ordered 
his horse. While waiting for the horse to 


192 


In “ God's Country: 


be brought round he walked up and down 
the porch in the cool, bracing air. In one 
of the garden-beds a belated rose was 
blooming. It was small and imperfect, 
but it was the color of those Lydia had 
worn that day she went to drive with him, 
and it conjured before him a vivid image 
of her as she looked that afternoon. He 
went out to get it, and as he stuck it in his 
buttonhole he glanced up at Lydia’s win- 
dow. There was no sign of anyone stir- 
ring inside, and he knew she was not an 
early riser. His eyes wandered idly along 
the upper porch until they reached Karl’s 
room, and there were riveted by the spec- 
tacle of his affianced wdfe coming out of 
the gardener’s room with dishevelled hair 
and white, tear-stained face. Their eyes 
met, and instantly Lydia realized all that 
the discovery involved — Bev’s renuncia- 


In ‘‘ God's Country." 


193 


tion of her, her own disgrace, and Karl’s 
death unless he could escape immediately. 

If Bev did not kill him her father would. 
They would ask no questions : what Bev 
had seen would be enough. For a moment 
Beverly stood as one paralyzed, then 
turned and ran up the steps of the porch 
with ominous haste. Perhaps he did not 
know of the back stairway leading to the 
room, or forgot it in his hurry. He did 
not attempt to reach them by it, but 
knocked violently on the Colonel’s door. 
Lydia heard the knock and knew there was 
no time to lose. 

“ Karl,” she said, “ you must fly for yuh 

life. Don’t stop to take anything with 

you, an’ don’t try to get clear off. Go 

down the back stairs an’ out by the garden. 

Maybe you can get to the creek before 

they catch you, an’ you can hide there so 
13 


194 


In “ God^s Country! 


they can’t find you. Wait in the place 
where we used to go for ferns, an’ as soon 
as it’s safe I’ll send yuh things by 
Schneider.” 

She spoke hurriedly, and pushed him 
toward the stairway, but Karl seemed in 
no haste to go. 

“ Vat vill dey do mit you ? ” he asked. 

“ I don’t know, but it makes no diif’r- 
ence : don’t stop to think o’ that.” 

I dink of netting else,” said Karl. I 
vill not leave you ; ve vill go togedder.” 

“For God’s sake, don’t waste a min- 
ute ! ” she said, in an agony of entreaty. 
“ We can’t both get away now. If you 
escape I may come to you, but if you stay 
here they will kill you.” 

They were coming up the back stairway ; 
they were almost at the top, and Karl 
had not moved. “ You vill gome to me ? ” 


In “ God^s Coufitry^ 




19s 


he asked again, and added doggedly, “ I 
vill not stir mitoud your promise.” 

“ Yes, yes. I’ll come,” she answered, 
dropping limply into a chair. 

Karl sprang from the room as the two 
men entered it, and Lydia, pale and 
motionless, sat unconscious of their pres- 
ence, while they rushed past her with only 
one thought — to lay hold of Karl. There 
was no way for him to get down-stairs from 
that side of the house, and they supposed 
he had run along the porch in the attempt 
to escape through the main building. 
While they searched the house, Karl, who 
had swung himself off the porch by the 
grape-vine at the end of it, was making 
his way to the vineyard, screened by the 
numerous outhouses that dotted the back 
yard. Through the thick foliage of the 
vineyard he ran unobserv ,d to the creek. 


196 


In “ God'S Country! 


Here, for a time at least, he was safe. He 
knew where there was a cavern in the rock 
large enough for a man to hide in. He 
had seen it that day when he swung over 
the cliff to get the flowers for Lydia. He 
ran along the edge of the creek until he 
came opposite the place, waded across, and 
climbed up by the help of the brush that 
grew along the side of the rock. The 
mouth of the cavern was covered with a 
mat of Virginia creeper, green when he 
last saw it, now burning red. He pushed 
aside the vine and crept in. The rock 
bottom of the cavern was covered with a 
deposit of leaves and mould that was soft 
and warm. He stretched himself out upon 
it and drew the mat of creeper over the 
opening. He had not slept for twenty-four 
hours ; he was fatigued with his long run, 
and wet from his dip in the creek, and he 


In “ God's Country! 


197 


hungered with the keen hunger that 
comes of exercise and faultless diges- 
tion ; he was an exile, and he was being 
hunted to the death ; but he was young 
and he was in love. He heard the bark- 
ing of dogs and the clatter of hoofs, and 
knew they were looking for him. He 
could even hear the snapping of twigs 
as they passed along the bluff close to 
his hiding-place ; but he saw only Lydia 
as she stood by him in the dawn, with 
the tender glow on her face and the 
flame of sunrise on her hair. He turned 
on his bed of leaves and slept like a 
god. 

There was no one in the house that 
day but Lydia. She knew that her father 
and Bev were looking for Karl, and 
that they would not stop till they found 
him. She knew what they would do 


198 


In “ God's Country," 


when they had found him, and that it 
was not Karl’s fault, but hers. In one 
thoughtless moment she had brought 
about this terrible state of affairs, in the 
disgrace of which Bev and her father 
shared equally with her, though the 
danger was Karl’s. Why could she not 
have let him go in peace? What gall 
and wormwood it must be to Bev to dis- 
cover such a rival ! She knew he loved 
her. To have lost her would have been 
pain enough without this bitter humilia- 
tion. She could not think of her father. 
The thought uppermost was to get away 
anywhere so that she might never look 
into his face again. She could think of 
nothing more terrible than meeting him. 
In the old proud, defiant days she had 
shrunk from the disgrace of being the 
wife of her father’s servant : how infi- 


In “ God's Coimtry^- 


199 


nitely worse was this ! It was not as bad 
as they thought, but it was bad enough ; 
and they would never know just how it 
was. They would never know of that 
long, weary struggle and the victory, 
which, though dimmed by the confession 
of her love for Karl, would still have 
been a victory but for Bev’s untimely 
appearance. Why had she gone out 
there she asked herself in an agony 
of self-reproach. There had been no 
thought of shame or fear in her mind 
when she went. It did not seem wrong 
to go. It did not seem wrong to be 
there as long as no one knew it but them- 
selves. Nothing she had done was really 
wrong ; it was simply Bev’s construction 
of the situation that made it terrible. It 
seemed to her that by the mere discovery 
the aspect of the whole affair was changed : 


200 


In “ God’s Country. 


an act harmless in itself had become 
heinous by being witnessed. She even 
thought differently of it herself now. She 
looked at it with the eyes of those who 
would judge her, and she could find for 
it no shadow of excuse. Karl had said 
he was not a vagabond in his own 
country, and she felt it to be true ; but 
her father would not be so easily con- 
vinced ; let Karl be what he might, her 
trespass was equally unpardonable in 
their eyes. She seemed to have no feel- 
ing left. Even the love that had been 
tugging at her heart with such maddening 
persistence all these months was crushed 
and voiceless. When she thought of 
meeting Karl again, it was only as a 
means of saving him from death, and 
escaping herself from the possibility of 
again meeting her father. There was not 


In God's Country." 


201 


the faintest thrill of pleasure in the antic- 
ipation. Her duty was to Karl, because 
it was her fault that he was being hunted 
to the death. Perhaps she might find in 
that far country an asylum from Bev’s 
scorn, her father’s outraged honor, and 
her own shame. This was her brightest 
hope. 

In assisting him to escape she must have 
help. She knew she could not depend on 
any of the negroes. The only chance of 
escape turned upon Schneider, and she was 
by no means sure of him. At noon, when 
he came to dinner, she sent for him to 
come to the house. 

Schneider,” she asked, dubiously, “ can 
I trust you to do something for Karl ?” 

A gleam of animation passed over the 
habitually stolid face. 

“ Yah, yah, you can,” he answered. 


202 


In “ God's Country." 


“Where are ’Laric an’ Black Fanny?” 

“ Over in de pasture by de creek.” 

“ Well, some time this evenin’ I want 
you to put black Fanny in the stable where 
I can get her, an’ to-night, after they have 
all gone to bed, put a saddle on ’Laric an’ 
lead him up the creek to that high bluff in 
Major Garland’s fiel’. You’ll fin’ Karl 
there. Leave the hawse with him, an’ tell 
him I’ll meet him an hour befoah day at 
the top of the cliff where we use’ to hitch 
the pha’ton. Don’ let anybody see you 
goin’, an’ remember his life depen’s on 
your gettin’ there in time.” 

Her plan was to gallop across the coun- 
try to some small station, where there 
would be little probability of herself or the 
horses being recognized, and there take the 
train. It would be necessary to ride a con- 
siderable distance, but the country was as 


In “ God’s Country I 


203 


familiar to her as a well-thumbed map, and 
if they could get an hour’s start on Alaric 
and Black Fanny they were safe. She did 
not attempt to encumber her flight with any 
thing in the shape of baggage. She took 
what money was in her purse, and some 
jewels she thought might prove useful, and 
alone in her room awaited the hour of 
flight. 

The Colonel and Bev came in that night 
from a fruitless chase. They turned the 
horses out, but did not go to bed. They 
had made diligent search wherever they 
thought it possible for a man to conceal 
himself in a country so open. They had 
questioned everybody they met, but no- 
body had seen Karl. They were now con- 
vinced that he was concealed somewhere 
about the house, and they did not doubt 
that he would make an attempt to escape 


204 


In “ God's Country." 


that night. With an indifference to fatigue, 
inspired by a burning desire for ven- 
geance, Beverly watched the front of the 
house all night, gun in hand, while the 
Colonel, similarly equipped, guarded the 
rear. They were so well prepared for 
Karl that he could not possibly have es- 
caped ; but they were wholly unprepared 
for what did happen. It was in that dim 
hour between day and night that Beverly 
saw a slender, darkly-habited figure steal 
out of the house and creep stealthily across 
the lawn in the direction of the stable lot. 
He could not fire upon it, and he could not 
molest it, because he was sure it was on its 
way to Karl, and it was Karl he wanted. 
His only chance was to follow it, but he 
had no horse. If he went for the horse, he 
would miss the direction, which he could 
only get by keeping an eye on Lydia. If 


In “ God's Country 


20 $ 


he attempted to call the Colonel, she would 
know that she was discovered and would 
mislead him. Several minutes were 
wasted in an agony of indecision, and then 
he fired the gun into the air. The shot 
was answered by a yelping chorus of dogs. 
It brought the Colonel to the spot instant- 
ly, but it also informed Lydia that she had 
been seen. She remembered that the 
horses had been turned into the pasture 
adjoining the lawn, and that Bev’s horse 
was very hard to catch. She knew that if 
she could once get started, nothing else 
could overtake them, and she resolved to 
risk it. 

As the Colonel came round the corner of 
the house, she sprang over the rock fence 
that inclosed the stable lot. They could 
not see her for the darkness, but they 
could hear the horse’s hoofs thumping the 


2o6 


In “ God's Country." 


ground as she bounded along the avenue 
at her utmost speed. 

“ It’s her,” said Bev. “ She’s gone to 
him, and now we’ll find him.” 

There was a sharp clatter of hoofs as 
she crossed the pike, and they fell again 
with a muffled beat as she rode into the 
lane. 

“ She’s gone down the dirt road,” said 
Bev. “ He mus’ be somewhere about the 
creek.” 

Lydia had counted correctly upon the 
difficulty of catching the horses. With the 
greatest haste, it was fifteen minutes before 
the Colonel was mounted, and then he was 
compelled to go on without Bev, who was 
still vainly endeavoring to beguile his wary 
horse into the bridle. But when she 
reached the bluff where Karl was waiting 
for her, she found that it was later than 


I7i God's Country." 


207 


she thought when she started. It was 
already light enough for her to see the 
forms of Karl and the horse he was hold- 
ing by the bridle rudely blocked against 
the sky. She did not ride into the field, 
but beckoned him to come on. It was 
with infinite relief she saw him mount from 
the ground with a splendid spring, and 
take the fence instead of waiting to open 
the gate. Because he played the piano 
and did not care to be a soldier, she was 
accustomed to regarding him as destitute 
of manly accomplishments, and all day she 
had been haunted by the fear that he 
would not be able to manage Alaric, a 
horse that required a firm hand and a 
steady seat. He could ride, and she felt 
encouraged for the race that was to tax 
both themselves and the horses to the ut- 
most. As he rode up to her and drew rein, 


2o8 


In “ God’s Country.” 


she tapped Black Fanny with the whip and 
said, “ Come on, they are aftah us.” 

The winding creek hemmed them on all 
sides but one. The lane led up to Major 
Garland’s house, and had no outlet but 
the one through which she had entered it. 
They were compelled to come back to the 
pike, and much of the advantage of the 
start was thus lost. Lydia felt that their 
only hope lay in the delay in catching the 
horses, and even this was a desperate one. 
They flew along the mile of lane and 
dashed into the pike abreast. The horses 
were splendidly matched in speed, and as 
they ran like the wind along the level 
stretch of pike in the tingling air of early 
morning, Lydia forgot the disgrace of her 
flight and the desperate chances of the 
chase; forgot she was running away with 
her father’s servant, and that, for one of 


In “ God's Country, 


209 


them at least, death was imminent ; — for- 
got everything in the exhilarating impetus 
of their tremendous pace but the fact that 
Karl rode at her side like one to the man- 
ner born. They had been on the pike five 
minutes when Lydia, looking behind, saw 
a single horseman far behind them dimly 
sketched upon the paling sky. At first she 
could not tell which it was ; but as it grew 
gradually lighter she recognized her father 
by the color of his horse and his pose in 
the saddle. Her surprise was equal to her 
relief, in discovering that it was her father 
and that he was alone. She could not 
understand why Bev had not come with 
him. If he could not get his own horse, 
she thought he would have taken some- 
thing else. His behavior was inexplicable, 
but through it they were saved. Her 
father could not overtake them ; it was not 


14 


210 


In “ God^s Country^ 


worth while to press the horses; all that 
was necessary was to keep at a safe dis- 
tance from him until the gray mare gave 
out, and keep steadily on in the direction 
they had first taken. By the time they 
reached the point she had in her mind they 
would have left him far behind, even if he 
did not give up the chase when he saw that 
it was hopeless. She drew rein and ran at 
an easier gait, measuring her pace with 
the accuracy of a thorough knowledge of 
the horses and what they had to accom- 
plish. 

It was with many a deep imprecation 
that Colonel Ransome recognized the two 
best horses on his place and divined the 
plan of the fugitives as he saw them 
slacken speed. The audacity of it filled 
him with tempestuous wrath. He saw that 
pursuit was futile, but he rode on, profane 


21 I 


In “ God^s Coimiryl 


ejaculations alternating with the prayer 
that Bev might come at last. It was some 
time before Lydia looked back again, and 
when she did, she saw far behind her 
father another horseman spurring toward 
them, and even at that distance and in that 
dim light she could recognize the magnifi- 
cent stride of Bev’s favorite hunter. Her 
heart sank ; she leaned close to Karl and 
said, “ Let him go ; it’s Bev, an’ he’s ridin’ 
Selim.” 

They could easily beat her father, but 
they could not beat Bev. She knew they 
could not possibly reach the station she 
had in her mind before they would be 
overtaken. What chance was left ? The 
stress of thought in the attempt to devise 
some other plan was as tremendous as 
their pace. It was getting lighter every 
moment, and presently she saw a long 


212 


In “ God^s Country! 


black line of smoke trailing across the 
horizon behind them ; it was the train 
from Lexington and it was coming toward 
them ; in twenty minutes it would be at 
Spring Station, where it would make but 
a moment’s stop. If they could reach 
there at the precise moment, they were 
safe. Before Bev could reach the station 
and take any measures to stop them, they 
would have arrived at the next, where they 
could leave the train and thus throw them 
off the scent. The plan shaped itself with 
the rapidity of desperation. A mile dis- 
tant across some fields there was a pike 
that led directly to the station. 

“ This way,” she called to Karl, as she 
wheeled and dashed over the rock fence 
into a stubble field. Karl followed, and 
on they went over fences, ditches, javines, 
all fear extinguished in the excitement of 


Li “ God's Country." 


213 


the race. Each time she looked back she 
could see that Bev, who was now in the 
lead, was steadily gaining on them ; but 
every minute brought them nearer to the 
station. The engine was whistling at 
Payne’s ; a single whistle — -it would not 
stop there ; in three minutes it would be at 
Midway; in five more it would reach 
the station whose shingle roof they could 
already see above the trees ; another 
field, and they would reach the pike. On 
the other side of the fence they were 
approaching was a deep depression that 
made it an ugly leap. They did not see 
it until it was too late to take the fence at 
another point. The horses went at it gal- 
lantly ; Alaric made it with something to 
spare, but Fanny, missing it by a hair’s 
breadth, slipped back into the ditch. 

As Lydia clambered unhurt out of the 


214 


In “ God' Country. 


ravine, she saw Karl, who had ridden 
back, in the act of dismounting. 

“ Don’t stop a minute,” she called to 
him. “ I am not hurt, but I can’t go on : 
the mare has broken her leg. Take this — 
you’ll need it,” she said, offering him her 
purse and a pistol she had cautiously 
secured before starting. Karl took only 
the pistol. 

“ Get up mit me,” he insisted. 

“ He can’t make it with both of us,” she 
answered ; and then, remembering his pre- 
vious obstinacy, added hurriedly, “ Go on, 
go on ; I’ll come if you get away.” 

He sprang into the saddle. As they had 
ridden on she had told him of her plan, 
and now as he darted away she called after 
him, “ Keep to the pike when you have 
crossed this fiel’, an’ turn to the right at 
the forks.” 


215 


III “ God^s Country.^' 


It was but an instant lost, but Bev had 
gained that much. For a moment she 
looked down at Fanny with a heart full 
of self-reproach. If she had only seen 
that place sooner. Then her eyes followed 
Karl, who had taken his last fence and was 
careering down the pike. He rode like a 
centaur, and he was certainly getting the 
utmost speed out of Alaric. Close behind 
her there was an ominous thunder of hoofs, 
and as she turned, Bev rose over the 
shoulder of the hill and spurred past her 
like the herald of doom. As he leaped the 
fence, his quick eye took in the horse in the 
ditch and her figure standing on the brink. 

Lydia now climbed into a tree that 
stood near the fence, to get a better view 
of the road. Into the pike and on Bev 
went, and Lydia, standing on one limb, 
steadying herself by another, strained her 


2i6 


In “ God^s Country: 


eyes upon the horseman who still led the 
chase. He was almost at the fork of the 
road — now he was there. A low cry 
broke from her. In his haste and con- 
fusion, or because he had not heard what 
she said, he had taken the wrong road. 
He could not escape now. Bev was gain- 
ing on him all the time. In a few minutes 
he would be near enough to pick a button 
off Karl’s coat with the weapon she was 
sure he had, though she could not see it. 

“ I don’t s’pose,” she said, bitterly, “ he 
could hit a flock o’ barns with a pistol if he 
was standin’ still.” 

Karl saw his mistake now and turned 
and fired, but his pursuer rode on un- 
touched. Lydia saw the sweep of Bev’s 
hand as he reached for the pistol in his 
hip pocket, a gesture eloquent of death. 

She closed her eyes. There was a sue- 


In “ God’s Country! 


217 


cession of sharp reports like the explosion 
of a bunch of fire-crackers, and then she 
did not hear even a hoof-beat. She opened 
her eyes with an effort. Bev was nowhere 
to be seen. A single horseman rode on 
into the fiery core of sunrise. 


X. 


Colonel Ransome had stopped in the 
last field on the hill, confident that Bev 
would overtake Karl in a few minutes. 
He rode on now as fast as he could. When 
he reached the point where Bev had disap- 
peared, he found him kneeling on the 
ground by Selim with rage in his heart and 
imprecations on his lips. 

“ How did it happen ? ” he asked, for he 
knew him to be the best shot with a pistol 
in the country. 

“ The cap snapped,” replied Bev, “ an’ 
befoah I could fiah again, he had hit the 
hawse, an’ he fell. I shot as long as I 
had a load, but he was too far off. You 

better get a buggy an’ take her home. 

218 


In “ God ’s Cou7itry.^^ 


219 


She’s over there in the fiel’ where Fanny 
fell. I’ll get another hawse an’ go on. 
He’s got to stop somewhere, an’ I owe him 
double now.” 

Beverly, mounted upon a fresh horse, 
continued the chase, but he saw nothing 
more of Karl. For a time he followed 
him by inquiries made along the road, but 
about noon he lost the trail and shortly 
after gave up the search. If he had not 
gone on in any of the roads which Bev- 
erly had followed, the latter was convinced 
that he must have doubled and gone back. 
The best chance now was to lie in wait 
for him near the Colonel’s place, to which 
Bev believed he would sooner or later re- 
turn. 

The negroes were saying to each other, 
it “ wuz same as if duh wuz a cawpse in de 
house.” From the moment of their return 


220 


In “ God's Cotmtryl 


in the morning neither Lydia nor the 
Colonel had been seen. The ColoneFs 
room on the ground floor was locked and 
the shutters were closed, and Meriky’s 
knocks at Lydia’s door had elicited no 
response. Breakfast was ready when they 
came home, but neither went near it ; din- 
ner had been served at noon as usual, but 
nobody dined ; and now the third meal of 
the day waited untasted on the table. 

“ Sump’n pow’ful curyus wuz hatchin* 
when Mahs Wick furgit he meals.” 

In that dark room on the ground floor 
sat Colonel Ransome, bowed by the most 
crushing humiliation he could have con- 
ceived. To him it was supreme, immitiga- 
ble : the bitterer because it was shared 
by Bev. There was no room in it for the 
sympathy and condolence of friends : com- 
plete isolation was the only salve. The 


In “ God’s Country. 


221 


world, life, is worth just so much to any 
man as he sees in it, and for him the world 
had suddenly become uninhabitable; life 
was emptied of all that made it desirable. 
He sat astride a chair, with his arms 
crossed and his head bent upon the back. 
Hours had passed since his head had. 
been lifted. He could not bear the light 
of day. The wrath that in the morning 
had stirred and sustained him had evapo- 
rated, leaving nothing but that abject 
terror of disgrace that could only be felt in 
all its intensity by a man as proud, as im- 
patient of criticism, as haughtily resentful 
of contumely as he. Other women had 
fallen into this same pit, and he had not 
been astonished, had not been moved. It 
was the way of the world. It would be, so 
long as men were mortal and women weak. 
He had always regarded woman as the 


222 


In “ God's Country! 


weaker vessel, and, like other men of his 
mould, men in whom a barbaric vigor of 
temperament is veiled, not subdued, by the 
ethics of civilization, he had not held aloof 
from legitimate prey. He could have 
looked back upon many an intrigue that 
was not attributable to the inexperience 
and the riotous blood of youth. He was 
wont to reply to the soft impeachments of 
his friends with the laughing rejoinder that 
he was no “ man of wood,” “ he wore no 
halo : ” but it did not occur to him that 
Lydia, who was his daughter, could not be 
expected to pose successfully as a graven 
image of womanhood before the temptation 
to which he invariably yielded without a 
struggle, and with a fatuous pride in the 
surrender. Like other men, he reverber- 
ated the adulatory assumption that men are 
more merciful to women than women are to 


In “ God^s Country.'*^ 


223 


each other, and he believed it. He had 
found it possible to bear himself with 
easy leniency toward the transgressions of 
women whose disgrace did not come home 
to him. He found no such excuses for the 
trespass against himself. The frailty of 
womankind, that opulence of nature which 
leads astray, was a thing with which he had 
many a time been merry over his glass. 
The follies, the small vanities of women, 
had been his amusement. The jest had 
been juiciest that showed them weakest, 
the story spiciest that attributed to them a 
vigor of temperament surpassing his own. 
But in discussing the sex he had done so 
always with the egregious assumption of 
superiority in those of his own household. 
Was a woman more or less than human 
because she had his blood in her veins ? 
He did not stop to consider that. Other 


224 


In God^s Country I 


women sinned and suffered. That was 
natural. Men were dishonored every day, 
and the world laughed unctuously behind 
their backs. That also was natural. But 
his daughter ! The thing was unthinkable, 
and it was true. Had she been the child 
of another he would have found in some 
part of a large and generous nature a drop 
of compassion. It was because she was 
his own that he had no mercy; because 
she was so dear to him — had been his 
glory, his pride — was the fair flower of a 
love that was a hallowed remembrance — 
his own heart’s blood — that he could find 
no extenuation. She had not only slain 
his pride, but she had brought into dis- 
honor an unsullied name. And men would 
think of her, speak of her, as he had 
thought and spoken of other women simi- 
larly placed. It was part of his punish- 


In “ God^s Country:^ 


225 


ment that the innumerable humiliations 
that Lydia in her ignorance could not know 
or dream of were present with him in all 
the miserable minutiae of disgrace. It was 
singular that the leniency of which he had 
boasted was more terrible to him now than 
the fiercest condemnation. He shrank 
from it as from torture. 

He did not know of the strenuous fight 
bravely, silently carried on under his very 
eyes. Had he known of it he could not 
have imagined its stress. There was no 
point in his experience, no stratum of his 
nature, from which to compute the inten- 
sity, the peril, the sublime endurance of 
that struggle waged between two inextin- 
guishable fires, the flame without and the 
flame within. As little could he measure 
the force of that imperious impulse, inher- 
ent in woman as in himself but the more 
IS 


226 


In “ God's Country'' 


formidable to her because it comes to her 
first like a surprise in a crisis ; lurks like 
a brooding tempest ; its strength, its pur- 
pose, its very existence unknown to her 
until the supreme moment in which it 
sweeps up in full tide from some abysmal 
depth of her being in a storm through 
whose tumult the ordinary affairs of life 
show paltry and ‘unreal. 

Accustomed to seeing the primeval 
instinct of nature masquerading either as 
saint or devil, applauded as virtue or con- 
demned as vice, he could not look upon it 
in its primitive nakedness as an essential 
impulse of that impersonal creative energy 
that is neither the one thing nor the other. 
This view, which, while it could not have 
drawn the iron from his soul, might have 
moved him to admiration for the victory so 
nearly won, compassion for the defeat that 


In “ God's Country." 


227 


was inevitable, was absent from his creed, 
beyond the grasp of his philosophy. 
Equally remote was the comprehensive 
charity of “ Go, and sin no more.” That 
might suffice for God and a better world, 
but it would not answer here. The keen- 
est agony of all lay in the thought that 
she must drag her bruised and tarnished 
womanhood to the bitter end of life, 
shunned by the women, preyed upon by 
the men who had delighted in honoring 
her. Had he been a Catholic, the cloister 
might have screened her ; but for the Prot- 
estant there was no such refuge. To com- 
mit her to the Roman Church was to 
commit her to the devil, according to his 
belief ; and yet in some way she must be 
saved from that lingering shame in the 
extremity of which she might be driven to 
further sin. All day and far into the night 


228 


In “ God's Country," 


he sat with this fanged thought rioting upon 
him. In this sweat of anguish the amiable 
complaisance, this debonair tolerance, the 
superficial gallantry of the man of the 
world fell away like a gay garment cast in 
a fight, and the rugged fibre of the real 
man stood forth in nude supremacy of re- 
solve, in a pagan simplicity of purpose^ 
beside which the frail code that bound him 
was as gossamer, and the creed that 
claimed him dwindled infinitesimally. 

At last he rose, felt in the top drawer of 
the bureau for something he knew was 
there, and put it in his pocket. He felt 
his way through the darkness to the stair- 
way, mounted it, and stopped at his daugh- 
ter’s door. He walked heavily, and Lydia 
knew the step. When the ex23ected knock 
came she got up and opened the door. 
She had been lying on the bed in her habit 


In “ God's Country'' 


229 


just as she returned from the ride. There 
was no light in the room but that of the 
full October moon; but that was enough. 
Her father’s face was white and haggard ; 
the story of the last two days was carved 
upon it ineffaceably. It was of him she 
had been thinking all day. After Karl’s 
escape she had not thought of him. She 
had not looked in her father’s face as they 
drove silently home that morning, but she 
had felt all that he felt. She had never 
dreamed that anything in life or death, or 
in that grim reckoning she had been taught 
to expect after death, could be so full of 
poignant agony as that drive had been. 
Through the long day and night she had 
been thinking of him, and her heart came 
back to him with a strenuous rebound. She 
had always loved him with a devotion as 
rare as it was beautiful. It seemed to her 


230 


In “ God's Country." 


that she had never loved him as she did 
now, when she knew that he was bowed 
beneath the weight of a humiliation with 
which she alone had power to crush him. 
The sight of his face wrung her as nothing 
else, not even Karl’s death, could have 
wrung her. She moved a chair toward him 
mechanically, but he did not notice it. 
He came close to her, but did not look at 
her, and their faces were spectral in the 
uncertain light. 

“Lydia,” he said, “when a girl has done 
what you have, there is only one other 
thing that can be done wuth decency. 
Your marriage with Bev can not come off 
now, and aftah this day’s work we can’t 
hope to keep the reason a secret. There 
is only one thing I can see to do,” he went 
on, in a steady voice : “ can you do it, or 


must I ? ” 


In “ God's Country- 


231 


He looked at her fixedly. She was so 
unmoved, so passive under his question, 
that he thought she had not understood it ; 
but before he could repeat it she answered, 
“ I will do it, father,” in a voice as steady 
as his own. 

He was not yet quite sure that she con- 
ceived him fully. He took something out 
of his pocket, laid it on the dressing-table, 
and turned toward the door. 

“Father, you’ll kiss me first?” 

The tone was tremulous now and plead- 
ing. 

Her father paused upon the threshold 
and half turned. He would have done it 
if he could. Had the lover been worthy of 
her, he might even have condoned the 
rest. But she had turned from the man 
who loved her worthily to debase her eyes 
upon a servant. He thought of Bev, the 


232 


In “ Gods Country! 


son of his best friend, the man who had 
generously rescued him from ruin, whose 
head, like his own, was bowed in shame ; 
thought of the ignoble lover she had 
sought to save at the expense of Bev’s life, 
at the expense of his own, if need be ; and 
he turned away. Even in the awful shad- 
ow of what was to come he could not par- 
don that. He went out and shut the door. 

“How base I mus’ be in his eyes,” 
thought Lydia, “if he can turn from me 
like that, when he knows — ” 

She turned slowly and took up the thing 
he had laid on the table. It was a small 
bowie knife in a brass-mounted sheath. 
She had seen it many a time in her father’s 
bureau drawer, and had heard it jokingly 
referred to as an “Arkansas toothpick.” 
It was keen-pointed and bright. She felt 
the edge *of it absently, laid it down, and 


In “ Gods Country: 


233 


began to undress. There was no impulse, 
no desire of appeal from the sentence. It 
was her father’s wish, and she accepted it 
as final. She would have been glad could 
he have known that she was less criminal 
than he thought her, but any attempt at 
extenuation would only make her appear 
less worthy of absolution in his eyes. It 
was hard to go unpitied, unforgiven ; but 
he should see that she did not falter. Per- 
haps in this act of expiation she might win 
back some small part of the love she had 
lost, of the pardon she craved. God knew 
what her father did not know, and perhaps 
God would be merciful. 

The long night passed. A pale glimmer 
of dawn filtered through the green wooden 
shutters that darkened the Colonel’s room, 
and he rose with a start, like one suddenly 
aroused from sleep. “Had she done it? ” 


234 


In God’s Country.” 


He walked totteringly out of the room and 
mounted the stairs slowly, heavily, as one 
who encounters an opposing force, and 
stopped before Lydia’s door. The still- 
ness of death brooded inside. He turned 
the knob and went in. The window was 
open, and the freshening breeze of morn- 
ing parted the white curtains and came in 
saturated with the odor of fennel and am- 
brosia. On the snowy bed near the win- 
dow, her- head slightly sunken in the soft 
pillow, lay his child, white and still as a 
parian bas-relief, the kiss of eternal peace 
upon her face. 

He drew nearer and looked at her 
steadily. Beside her lay the knife, a 
single drop of blood on its point. He 
turned back the sheet. There was a dark 
red stain on her left arm, and beneath it 
some sheets had been folded thickly to ab- 


In “ God's Country." 235 


sorb the ebbing current of life. He noted 
tlris and other signs of deliberate prepara- 
tion with pained wonder. Her sustained 
courage awed him. He would have done 
it as fearlessly, but he must have done 
it more quickly. Her readiness to die 
appealed, as nothing else could, to that 
recklessness of life that was the foundation 
of his own courage. She shared with him 
the contempt of mere breath when all of 
life but breath had been eliminated. It 
was the ring of the true metal, and the old 
pride that lay with its head in the dust 
leaped up and gloried in the fearless, un- 
questioning atonement. The act knit him 
to her with strenuous sympathy ; it illu- 
mined for him the life of which he had 
known little, though its still waters flowed 
so near him. He choked now. His mas- 
sive chest heaved, and his eyes brimmed 


236 


In “ God's Country! 


over as he looked down at the face, fair 
and fresh as it had been in the gladdest 
day of her unsullied girlhood. She was 
his daughter after all ; to the last drop of 
blood in her veins she was his own. She 
had not quailed at the sentence, she had 
not faltered in the execution : there was no 
fear in her. He knew she had been proud 
as he; she had shared his prejudices 
as she had shared his courage. Thus 
equipped, he could well believe she had 
not yielded tarnely. She must have 
suifered. Such pride, such courage could 
have yielded to nothing less than the impe- 
rious passion that was one of the basic 
elements of his own nature. In the pres- 
ence of that supreme expiation he could 
even look admiringly on the impetuous 
daring of the love that had wrecked her. 
Karl had said it was divine. To her 


In “ God's Country! 


237 


father in this new light it was splendidly 
human in its audacity and completeness. 
He could understand it because it was 
a part of him. He could now remember 
with patience that the gardener had a 
handsome face and gentle ways. He had 
noticed that himself. And whatever else 
he may have been, he was a man and 
young, and Lydia was beautiful. The 
marble majesty of death was eloquent for 
her who could not speak for herself. In 
the silence and dim dusk of that chamber 
some things that had been hidden were re- 
vealed. It was but a glimmer, but it was 
enough. He loved her dead as he had 
never loved her living ; he forgave her all. 
The kiss of reconciliation denied to the 
warm, pleading mouth was passionately 
pressed on the lips that could not answer 
it. 


In God's Country'' 


238 


“ Brave girl ! brave girl ! ” he murmured, 
chokingly. 

In a vase on the table were some flowers 
she had placed there a few days before. 
They seemed a part of her. He raised 
them to his lips and laid them on her 
breast. As he turned away from the bed, 
the face that looked at him out of the mir- 
ror over the dressing-table was old, old ; 
and the iron-gray locks that yesterday set 
off his handsome head were white. 

In the crisp, cool air of an October 
morning two men stood talking at the 
avenue gate. They .were Karl and 
Schneider, and they spoke in German and 
spoke softly. Presently Schneider turned 
back to the house. Karl lingered a 
moment at the gate. “ It was divine,” he 
murmured, “but it is over.” The future 


In “ God's Country." 


239 


dwindled miserably before him; his heart 
was heavy and his eyes were dim ; but 
through the ache of withholden bliss there 
ran a flash of exultation — the other could 
not have her. 

He walked on slowly until he came to 
the point in the road from which he had 
caught the first glimpse of the house on 
that April afternoon. A white rime lay on 
the fences and the fields that then were 
green ; the locust trees then full of bloom 
were bare of leaves, and where he had 
gathered violets the .golden-rod hung out 
its yellow tassels, and the dusky red berries 
and brilliant foliage of the sumach burned 
above them. He turned and looked across 
“ God’s Country.” The maple grove upon 
the hill blazed red and yellow against the 
pale autumn sky ; in the midst of it the 
Colonel’s house, square and massive, rose 


240 


In “ God's Country y 


like an altar wrapped in flame, and above 
it the soft, dull haze of Indian summer 
floated like the smoke ‘of sacrifice. 

He heard but did not heed the clatter of 
hoofs on the pike behind him, till a pistol- 
shot rang out sharp and clear in the frosty 
air. Then he turned and saw Beverly 
Johnson riding toward him, pistol in hand. 
He took from his pocket the one Lydia 
had given him, snapped it several times 
to show that it was unloaded, and threw it 
from him. He made no attempt to get 
away, no bid for quarter save the display 
of his empty weapon. He stood leaning 
carelessly against the bole of a tree by the 
roadside, and no muscle or line of his face 
changed as Beverly rode up to him with 
his finger on the trigger. The absolute 
fearlessness of pose and bearing would 
under other circumstances have appealed 


In “ God^s Country^ 


241 


strongly to Beverly’s admiration. But 
what would have been a splendid display 
of courage in a man who was his equal, in 
a servant was exasperating impertinence. 
He would have scorned to take such an 
advantage of a gentleman, but Karl had no 
rights. Moreover, he had loved success- 
fully the woman of his choice, he had dis- 
honored him, and he had killed his horse. 
That fierce greed of absolute possession 
that colors the love of every man, and pro- 
claims his kinship with the Turk, had been 
crossed. Beverly fired with as little com- 
punction as he would have fired on a thief, 
and Karl fell back among the dry leaves 
and grass on the roadside, pierced by two 
bullets that had struck him scarcely an 
inch apart. 

Beverly’s face, dark and threatening, 

bent over him ; a spasm of pain crossed 
16 


242 


In “ God's Country'' 


that of the dying man ; then he looked up 
at his slayer and said, with a smile that 
cheated vengeance of its triumph, 

“ I vill see her — to-day.” 

He closed his eyes, and, with a long 
respiration that was like a sigh of relief, 
his life went out. 

***** 

“Killed in Kentucky” was the head- 
line under which the New York Sun a few 
days later announced the death of Karl 
and gave some particulars concerning him 
until then unknowm. “ He was,” the 
despatch stated, “the son of Prince Fred- 
erick of S , the young Count Alfred, 

who had been in America for a year, dur- 
ing which time his father had beeli igno- 
rant of his whereabouts. He had run 
away from the Bonn University, where he 
was studying, because his father wanted 


In “ God's Country: 


243 


to force him into a marriage that was dis- 
tasteful to him, and had, when discovered, 
refused to return unless the proposed mar- 
riage were declared off. The Prince 
finally relented, and his son was on the 
point of leaving the country when killed. 
When discovered he was working as a com- 
mon laborer on a farm in Kentucky, and 
was recognized by a man named Schneider, 
who had served in the same regiment of 
hussars in Germany.” 


THE END. 







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to^ an undisputed placje in the foremost ranks of American 
periodicals, without resorting to any of the unworthy devices 
by which new publications often attain a temporary success. 
Solely by its merits as a purveyor of pure and sparkling 
stories, essays and poems from the pens of the ablest and 
most popular writers of America; by its intellectual in- 
tegrity, regardless alike of party or faction, in the discussion 
of the great political issues of the day ; by its patriotic spirit, 
equally free from sectional bias and partisan prejudice, it 
has made itself a welcome visitor in every State of the Union 
and by every class of readers. There is no precedent in the 
annals of the American book trade of a success so swiftly 
and so widely won. 

The proprietors and editors, not content with the great 
triumph they have won, are determined to make BelfonVs 
Magazine still more worthy of its wide popularity, and to 
extend it. No labor and no expense will be spared to 
secure as contributors the greatest authors of the age, and 
new features will be added from time to time to give still 
greater variety and fascination to its sparkling pages. 

Each number, besides short stories, by' the most popular 
writers, will contain a complete novel of high character and 
from distinguished authors. 

Price $2.50 a year, or 25 cents per number. For sale 
bv all newsdealers and booksellers. Address 

THE BELFORD COMPANY, 

18^22 East 18th Street, New York City. 























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